Date: 21-Jul-2009
From: Ellen Contini-Morava <elc9jvirginia.edu>
Subject: Obituary: Erica García, 1934-2009
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We grieve to announce the passing of Erica C. García, of cardiac arrest inthe early hours of July 5, 2009 in Leiden, the Netherlands. She hadreturned to Holland from Italy (her home since her retirement from LeidenUniversity in 1999) to do research in the university library. She had justfinished correcting the final proofs of what must be regarded as the magnumopus of her 40-year-long linguistic career, her 300-page book entitled TheMotivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs: Cognitive Constraints on SpanishClitic Clustering (John Benjamins, in press). The theoretical point of thebook, and the theme of many if not most of her numerous articles on manytopics, is that the only arbitrariness in Language is that of thelinguistic sign, and that phenomena which others have treated as productsof an arbitrary syntax (as in various versions of generative grammar andother formal schools of linguistics) are more profitably regarded as theproduct of the meaning of the sign or signs in question and thenon-arbitrary interpretive or compositional routines motivated by thosemeanings. There is, in other words, no ''machinery for machinery's sake''in Language. As she states in the conclusion of her forthcoming book:
''Language is, fundamentally, a phenomenon of the 'third type'..., i.e. an unintended human-social product, shaped in invisible-hand fashion throughand in its actual performance...'Competence' and 'performance' can thushardly be kept apart, for they coexist in the same mind, and one's own andothers' performance can always be (re)interpreted as evidence of what the'language' itself is like.
This indeterminacy is truly fundamental, for syntactic versatility isinexorably required by the unpredictability of language users'communicative needs, whose vagaries constantly require improvised - andhence iconic - syn-tactic expression. Communicative openness andversatility have a cost, i.e. the cognitive effort required bycom-position, in both production and interpretation.
Cognitively economical solutions of communicative problems can be expectedto enjoy a quantitative edge in use: that favours their rote-recall, andmay eventually result in re-analysis of a con-struct as a structurally'arbitrary' unit. As often pointed out, grammatical change is a one-waystreet from iconic com-position, where calculus plays a dominant role, tothe simple retrieval of an arbitrary symbol...The critical shift presumablytakes place when the retrieval of an (unanalyzed complex) item provescognitively more economic than actual calculus of the sequence..., but thecognitive cost of competing alternatives cannot be gauged without some ideaof what synchronically motivates the choice of one as against anothercommunicative alternative.''
Erica García received her Ph.D. from the Columbia University Department ofLinguistics in 1964, during what has been called that Department's 'GoldenAge', with such scholars as Robert Austerlitz, William Diver, MarvinHerzog, William Labov, John Lotz, and Uriel Weinreich. In the early years,she was associated with the approach to linguistics originated by Diver andwhich has since come to be known as the 'Columbia School;' cf.Contini-Morava and Sussman Goldberg (1995) and Davis, Gorup, and Stern(2006). Her first book-length attempt to deal with Spanish clitic pronouns,The Role of Theory in Linguistic Analysis (1975), dates from this period.After leaving Columbia in 1971, she taught until 1979 at the CityUniversity of New York (Lehman College and Graduate Center), then moved toLeiden University, where she became Associate Professor (1979) andProfessor (1992) in the Department of Languages and Cultures of LatinAmerica. She was also a member of the editorial board of Lingua from 1983to 1996.
Brilliant, fierce, intolerant of intellectual dishonesty and incompetence,Erica refused to play the non-threatening, secondary role which women wereexpected to play in academe in the 1970s. Those who studied with her or whoasked her for critical comments on their manuscripts discovered that shewas unrelentingly thorough in matters of both theory and data, uncoveringevery weakness in fact and argumentation, no matter what language was thetopic. There was many a chuckle over Geoff Nunberg's cartoon of herroasting a hapless seminar participant in a cauldron, captioned ''TheInhuman Factor''. However, no matter how unpleasant it might have been toendure the roasting, the result was always a great improvement over theearlier draft. Those students at Columbia or CUNY who learned to dolinguistics by writing Master's Essays or dissertations under her guidancelearned full well what she meant when she would comment on the perceivedslovenly work of some linguist giving a talk that, ''The trouble withLinguist X is that s/he has never written a Master's Essay.''
A complete bibliography of Erica García's work must await publication of amuch more complete obituary than this brief notice could be. Her interestsranged from the history of English to psycholinguistics to many aspects ofSpanish grammar. She published in such varied collections as Discourse andSyntax (1979), Discourse Perspectives on Syntax (1981), New Vistas inGrammar: Invariance and Variation (1991), Studies in Language Variation(1977), and Studies in Romance Linguistics (1986). Her articles alsoappeared in such journals as Language, Folia Linguistica, the Journal ofPsycholinguistic Research, Lexis, Lenguaje en Contexto, Lingua,Linguistics, Linguistische Berichte, and Neuphilologische Mitteilungen.
References:
Contini-Morava, Ellen and Barbara Sussman Goldberg (eds.) 1995. Meaning asExplanation: Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory. Berlin and New York:Mouton de Gruyter.
Davis, Joseph; Radmila J. Gorup and Nancy Stern. (eds.) 2006. Advances inFunctional Linguistics: Columbia School beyond its origins. Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins.
García, Erica. 1975. The Role of Theory in Linguistic Analysis: the Spanishpronoun system. Amsterdam: North Holland.
(in press). The Motivated Syntax of Arbitrary Signs: cognitive constraintson Spanish clitic clustering. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
***************************************Robert S. KirsnerDepartment of Germanic Languages212 Royce Hall - UCLALos Angeles, CA 90095-1539 USA
Ellen Contini-MoravaDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of VirginiaCharlottesville, VA 22904-4120 USA
Linguistic Field(s):
Not Applicable
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