Anna Siewierska
Encyclopedia
Anna Siewierska was a Polish-born linguist who worked in Australia, Poland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She was professor of linguistics at Lancaster University
and one of the leading specialists in language typology.
under Barry Blake, writing an M.A. thesis on passive construction
s that was later published as a book and was widely cited. She worked at the University of Gdańsk from 1980 and took active part in the historic events surrounding the rise of Solidarność, working as a link between the trade union’s leadership and English-speaking journalists. She received her Ph.D. degree from Monash University in 1985, with a dissertation on word order
. .
Between 1990 and 1994 she was associated with the University of Amsterdam, working in Simon Dik’s Functional Grammar
group, before moving to Lancaster University. She was president of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in 2001-2002, and president of the Association for Linguistic Typology between 2007 and 2011.
She died in a car accident while on holiday in Vietnam following a conference on linguistic typology in Hong Kong. She was married to the Dutch linguist Dik Bakker.
s, as well as the grammar of object
s. She did extensive work on word order phenomena in the world’s languages. From the mid 1990s onward, much of her typological work focused on person markers such as personal pronoun
s and agreement marker
s.
Siewierska contributed significantly to building bridges in linguistics between different schools. She has an early association with Functional Grammar and other functionalist approaches to the study of language structure, but she also tried to incorporate insights from generative
frameworks such as Lexical Functional Grammar
, from corpus linguistics
, and from cognitive linguistics
and construction grammar
.
Lancaster University
Lancaster University, officially The University of Lancaster, is a leading research-intensive British university in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. The university was established by Royal Charter in 1964 and initially based in St Leonard's Gate until moving to a purpose-built 300 acre campus at...
and one of the leading specialists in language typology.
Life
Anna Siewierska spent several years in her youth in Australia, as her father was working for a Polish trade company in Melbourne. She studied linguistics at Monash UniversityMonash University
Monash University is a public university based in Melbourne, Victoria. It was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. Monash is a member of Australia's Group of Eight and the ASAIHL....
under Barry Blake, writing an M.A. thesis on passive construction
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
s that was later published as a book and was widely cited. She worked at the University of Gdańsk from 1980 and took active part in the historic events surrounding the rise of Solidarność, working as a link between the trade union’s leadership and English-speaking journalists. She received her Ph.D. degree from Monash University in 1985, with a dissertation on word order
Word order
In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...
. .
Between 1990 and 1994 she was associated with the University of Amsterdam, working in Simon Dik’s Functional Grammar
Functional grammar
Functional theories of grammar include a range of functionally based approaches to linguistics, the scientific study of language. The grammar model developed by Simon Dik bears this qualification in its name, functional grammar, as does Michael Halliday's systemic functional grammar.Role and...
group, before moving to Lancaster University. She was president of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in 2001-2002, and president of the Association for Linguistic Typology between 2007 and 2011.
She died in a car accident while on holiday in Vietnam following a conference on linguistic typology in Hong Kong. She was married to the Dutch linguist Dik Bakker.
Contributions
Siewierska was best known for her work on world-wide comparative grammar (language typology), where she worked on a wide range of phenomena, often comparing hundreds of languages from around the world. She always had an interest in voice phenomena such as passive constructions and impersonal constructionImpersonal passive voice
The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb to zero.The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb. In place of the verb's subject, the construction instead may include a syntactic placeholder, also called a dummy. This...
s, as well as the grammar of object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
s. She did extensive work on word order phenomena in the world’s languages. From the mid 1990s onward, much of her typological work focused on person markers such as personal pronoun
Personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...
s and agreement marker
Agreement (linguistics)
In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
s.
Siewierska contributed significantly to building bridges in linguistics between different schools. She has an early association with Functional Grammar and other functionalist approaches to the study of language structure, but she also tried to incorporate insights from generative
Generative linguistics
Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping,...
frameworks such as Lexical Functional Grammar
Lexical functional grammar
Lexical functional grammar is a grammar framework in theoretical linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to...
, from corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...
, and from cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
In linguistics, cognitive linguistics refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms...
and construction grammar
Construction grammar
The term construction grammar covers a family of theories, or models, of grammar that are based on the idea that the primary unit of grammar is the grammatical construction rather than the atomic syntactic unit and the rule that combines atomic units, and that the grammar of a language is made up...
.
Selected works
- Hengeveld, Kees, Jan Rijkhoff & Anna Siewierska. 2004. Parts of speech systems as a basic typological parameter. Journal of Linguistics 40.2: 527-570.
- Hollmann, Willem B. & Anna Siewierska. 2007. A construction grammar account of possessive constructions in Lancashire dialect: some advantages and challenges. English Language and Linguistics 11: 407-424.
- Hollmann, Willem B. & Anna Siewierska. 2011. The status of frequency, schemas, and identity in Cognitive Sociolinguistics: A case study on definite article reduction. Cognitive Linguistics 22.1: 25-54.
- Malchukov, Andrej, & Anna Siewierska (eds.). 2011. Impersonal constructions: a cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Siewierska, Anna. 1984. The passive: A comparative linguistic analysis. London: Routledge.
- Siewierska, Anna. 1988. Word Order Rules. Kent: Croom Helm.
- Siewierska, Anna. 1991. Functional grammar. London: Routledge.
- Siewierska, Anna. 1993. Subject and object order in written Polish: some statistical data. Folia Linguistica 27. 1/2, 147-169.
- Siewierska, Anna. 1998a. Nominal and verbal person marking. Linguistic Typology 2, 1-53.
- Siewierska, Anna. 1998b. Languages with and without objects. Languages in Contrast 1.2: 173-190.
- Siewierska, Anna (ed.) 1998. Constituent order in the languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Siewierska, Anna. 1999a. Reduced pronominals and argument prominence. In Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG 99 Conference. Stanford: CSIL Publications.
- Siewierska, Anna. 1999b. From anaphoric pronoun to grammatical agreement marker: why objects don't make it. Folia Linguistica 33/2 : 225-251.
- Siewierska, Anna. 2003. Person agreement and the determination of alignment. Transactions of the Philological Society 101.2, 339-370.
- Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Siewierska, Anna. 2005a. Verbal person marking. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, & Bernard Comrie (eds.), The world atlas of language structures, 414-417. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://wals.info/chapter/102
- Siewierska, Anna. 2005a. Passive constructions. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, & Bernard Comrie (eds.), The world atlas of language structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://wals.info/chapter/107
- Siewierska, Anna. 2006. Linguistic typology: where functionalism and formalism almost meet. In A. Duszak & U. Okulska (eds.), Bridges and Walls in Metalinguistic Discourse. Berlin: Peter Lang, 57-76.
- Siewierska, Anna & Bakker, Dik. 2005. The agreement cross-reference continuum: person marking in Functional Grammar. In: Kees Hengeveld & Casper de Groot (eds.), Morphosyntactic expression in Functional Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 203 - 248.
- Siewierska, Anna & Song, Jae Jung (eds.) 1998. Case, typology and grammar (Barry Blake festschrift). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Siewierska, Anna & Jiajin Xu & Richard Xiao. 2010. Bang-le yi ge da mang (offered a big helping hand): A corpus study of the splittable compounds in spoken and written Chinese. Language Sciences 32: 464-487.