LINGUIST List 29.599
Mon Feb 05 2018
All: Obituary: Matti Rissanen (1937-2018)
Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <kenlinguistlist.org>
Date: 04-Feb-2018
From: Terttu Nevalainen <terttu.nevalainen
helsinki.fi>
Subject: Obituary: Matti Rissanen (1937-2018)
E-mail this
message to a friend It is with great sadness that we announce the
death of Matti Rissanen, Professor Emeritus of English Philology at the University
of Helsinki, at the age of 80 on 24 January 2018. He was a pioneer in English
historical corpus linguistics, and the director of the project that produced the
Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, which covers a thousand years of the history of
English and has been used widely since its publication in 1991.
Matti
Rissanen was one of the rare scholars to command the history of the English language
from its early stages to the present, beginning with his PhD thesis (1967) on the
Old English numeral ONE. His wide range of publications includes a number of
original articles and several co-edited volumes of corpus-based research, such as
Early English in the Computer Age (1993), English in Transition and
Grammaticalization at Work (1997), as well as the much cited chapter on Early Modern
English syntax in The Cambridge History of the English Language (vol. 3, 1999). Also
taking an active interest in early American English, he was one of the international
team that re-edited the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009).
Active in
numerous professional organizations, Matti Rissanen served as president of the
Societas Linguistica Europaea and chaired the Board of the International Computer
Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME). He was the founder and first
director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English
(VARIENG), an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence from 2000 to 2011. He was also
a driving force in the foundation of the Finnish Institute in London and the
Language Centre of the University of Helsinki. In recognition of his achievements
Matti Rissanen received many awards, including an honorary doctorate of the
University of Uppsala, Sweden, and being elected to the Finnish Academy of Science
and Letters. He was an Honorary member of the Modern Language Society, the
International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, and the Japan Association for English
Corpus Studies.
Unfailing optimism was the most striking characteristic of
Matti's. He was a supervisor to generations of students, and his amiable and
good-humoured encouragement and support to undergraduate and doctoral students as
well as colleagues both in Finland and abroad were beyond compare. Matti's
retirement in 2001 did not mark an end to his research activities. His philological
expertise made an instrumental contribution to the publication project that resulted
in a new Finnish translation of all Shakespeare’s works. One of his long-lasting
research interests was the history of English connectives, on which he was working
to the very last days of his life.
Matti Rissanen will be greatly missed by
his family and a wide circle of friends and colleagues. Those who would like to
share their memories and recollections of him are welcome to do so by adding them as
comments (in English or Finnish) to the VARIENG blog post at
https://variblog.wordpress.com/.
Links:
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng/matti-rissanen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matti_Rissanen
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
Page Updated: 05-Feb-2018