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2003 - Professor
Marianne Mithun
Citation for award of Degree of Doctor
of Letters (honoris causa)
Marianne Mithun is one of the two or three leading scholars in linguistic
typology in the world today; she is currently President of the Association
for Linguistic Typology.
Amongst Mithun's many contributions to the typology of human languages,
those on noun incorporation, on grammaticalisation, and on ergativity
and active/stative languages are absolutely seminal. All studies on these
topics, by linguists from every continent, are in terms of Mithun's parameters
and generalisations. Mithun has pioneered an inductive methodology for
typological research, drawing on her extensive first-hand fieldwork experience
and on an unparalleled knowledge of the linguistic literature spanning
six continents.
She has, in addition, done valuable work on word order, causatives, negation,
number systems, alienable and inalienable possession, realis/irrealis
marking, switch reference, pronominal systems, coordination, voice, number
systems in grammar, demonstratives, evidentials, and noun classes. Her
work on the nature of polysynthesis and of inflection has attracted favourable
comment. In the subfield of phonology she has made contributions on sibilant
harmony, and on topics in prosody. She has also done substantial work
on language contact, on morphological and syntactic change, and on syntactic
reconstruction.
Mithun's main field of empirical specialisation is the indigenous languages
of the USA and Canada. She is the leading expert on languages of the Iroquoian
family, having written grammatical monographs on Tuscarora and Cayuga,
and also undertaken fieldwork and published papers on Mohawk, Oneida,
Onondaga, Seneca, Susquedannock, Huron, Wyandot and Cherokee. Other American
Indian languages on which she has worked include Lakhota, Dakota and Tutelo
(Siouan family), Central Pomo (Pomoan family), Chumash, languages of the
Hokan family, and Yupik (Eskimo-Aleut family). From outside North America,
she has published important work on the Romance languages and on Selayarese
and Kapampangan (Austronesian family).
Mithun was co-editor of and a major contributor to The languages of North
America: historical and comparative assessment (University of Texas Press,
1979) which was for two decades the major reference work in this area.
It was superseded by Mithun's sole-authored work, The languages of Native
North America (Cambridge University Press, 1999), one of the finest linguistics
book it has been our pleasure to read. In masterly fashion, Mithun provides
a typological characterisation of the wealth of languages across the continent,
assesses both professional and amateur source materials, and provides
a judicious overview of genetic relationships. This volume was awarded
the Leonard Bloomfield prize for the best monograph published in a two-year
period across all fields of linguistics.
Following her PhD at Yale (on Tuscarora), Marianne Mithun taught at the
State University of New York at Albany, Since 1986 she has been Professor
in the distinguished Linguistics Department of the University of California
at Santa Barbara. She is on the editorial boards of the prestigious journals
Studies in Language and Linguistic Typology. Her many consultancies include
working with the consortium of the six Mohawk Nations, and of the Tuscarora
Nation.
Much of Mithun's work has been with endangered languages, and she has
also published interesting work on the typology of language obsolescence.
She has devoted time and effort to training native speakers of American
Indian languages to become linguists for their own languages, and has
published on literacy issues and on orthography planning.
All in all, Marianne Mithun is without peer in the breadth of her work,
the depth of explanation she achieves, and the many manifest contributions
she has made to the advancement of linguistic knowledge, which further
our understanding of the cognitive language ability of the human race.
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