Aaron is survived by his wife Merryl, three children, their partners, and four grandchildren. We join them in mourning. 

https://memorialsource.com/memorial/aaron-victor-cicourel

The use of boosters and evidentials in British campaign debates on the Brexit referendum, María Luisa Carrió-Pastor & Ana Albalat-Mascarell

An empirical study of Chinese university student advisors’ dynamic identity construction in the context of individual consultation, Jing Chen & Xin Zhao

Development of the use of discourse markers across different fluency levels of CEFR: A learner corpus analysis, Lan-fen Huang, Yen-liang Lin & Tomáš Gráf

The son (érzi) is not really a son: Generalization of address terms in Chinese online discourse, Kun Yang & Jing Chen

Power dynamics and pragma-cultural sources of unsourced evidentiality in Persian, Amin Zaini & Hossein Shokouhi

‘That is very important, isn’t it?’: Content-oriented questions in British and Montenegrin university lectures, Branka Živković

Pragmatics 33:2

Japanese turn-final tteyuu as a formulation device, Yuki Arita

How to be authentic on Instagram: Self-presentation and language choice of Basque university students in a multi-scalar context, Agurtzane Elordui & Jokin Aiestaran

Nigerian stand-up comediennes performing femininity: A pragmatic analysis, Ibukun Filani

Hong Kong Cantonese TV talk shows: When code-switching manifests as impoliteness, Cher Leng Lee & Daoning Zhu

Japanese no datta and no de atta in written discourse: Past forms of no da and no de aru, Hironori Nishi

Overlaps in collaboration adjustments: A cross-genre study of female university students’ interactions in American English and Japanese, Lala U. Takeda

On February 10, 2023, Jacob Mey died in Austin, Texas. His death is a great loss to the pragmatic community in general but especially to the International Pragmatics Association. He was a member of the IPrA Consulting Board from the beginning in 1986. He gave a keynote at the 4th International Pragmatics Conference in Kobe, Japan. On October 30, 2021, Jacob L. Mey received the IPrA ‘Award for Foundational Service in the Field of Pragmatics’.

Mey was born in Amsterdam on October 30, 1926. Having become a Jesuit, he arrived in Denmark in 1952 and took up the study of linguistics under Louis Hjelmslev; he took a degree in 1960 with a thesis La catégorie du nombre en finnois moderne. (He later left the Jesuit order.) He was a lecturer in linguistics at Oslo University, 1960-1966, and an associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin, 1966-1972. From 1972 to his retirement in 1996, he was Professor of linguistics in Odense (Denmark). He held numerous research fellowships and guest professorships, among others in Santa Monica (Rand Corporation, USA), Washington, Prague, Frankfurt, Campinas (Brazil), Haifa (Israel), Södertörn (Sweden), Brasília, New Haven, Evanston, Warwick, Hong Kong and Tsukuba (Japan). In 1993, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Zaragoza.

In 1977, he founded the Journal of Pragmatics with Hartmut Haberland, and it soon became one of the leading journals, if not the leading journal, in the field that it in part had established. He was Chief Editor of the Journal until 2010, when the publisher replaced him. In  the same year he took, as a reaction, the initiative to a new journal Pragmatics and Society, together with Kerstin Fischer and Hartmut Haberland. In 2017, Elsevier Publishers established the Jacob L. Mey and Hartmut Haberland Early Career Award in recognition of the Journal of Pragmatics’ founding editors’ support for young scholars.

His contributions to journals and edited volumes are numerous. He edited a book, which after long delay appeared in 1979, Pragmalinguistics: Theory and Practice. This book marked Jacob’s entry into the field of pragmatics, which he defined as the study of language in the context of society. While not denying the relevance of structure in this context, he reminded us of the responsibility to society that students of language have. Thus he was one of the founders of what later became known as ‘Continental Pragmatics’ or ‘Pragmatics as a perspective’ (rather than a mere subdiscipline of linguistic studies), a concept he developed with Jef Verschueren. In one of his books he asked his academic fellows, “How can we make this world a better place in which to live?”. His view of pragmatics as the study of language use as a social activity was first hammered out in his Whose Language? A Study in Linguistic Pragmatics of 1985. This was followed in 1993 by his textbook Pragmatics: An Introduction, which was translated into several languages and followed by a revised second edition in 2001. In 2000, he dealt with one of his favorite topics, the relationship between language and literature in his When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics.

Constant awareness of the responsibility of students of language to society made Jacob’s work almost interdisciplinary by definition, but interdisciplinarity was also fed by Jacob’s broad-reaching (sometimes he referred to it as ‘catholic’) interest in language in all its facets. In the 60’s he had worked with the link of language to computation and he never quite lost his interest in the relationship between language and machines and in the pragmatic aspects of artificial intelligence. The relevance of pragmatics for literature is another of these facets.

His most important contribution to pragmatic theory is perhaps his notion of the ‘instantiated pragmatic act’ or ‘pragmeme,’ which he developed in the second edition of Pragmatics.

Jacob was fluent in a great  number of languages. Apart from his native Dutch these comprised at least English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech and German and all the Nordic languages (except Icelandic but including Finnish), and he could read several more. He took a great deal of interest in the study of Japanese, especially its writing system. Having become acquainted with Latin, Greek and Hebrew already in school he added Sanskrit during his studies. His knowledge (and love) of Greek and Roman literature was amazing.

Jacob is survived by his daughter from his first marriage und his wife Inger (married in 1965) and their five children.

[This obituary was contributed by Hartmut Haberland]

John is survived by his wife Linda, his daughters Kelly and Lauren, his sons-in-law David and Larry, and his grandchildren John and Teddy.

 The following tribute is offered by John’s colleagues at Ulster University, Catrin S Rhys, Karyn Stapleton, and Frank Ferguson

 It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death, last week, of our former colleague and friend, Emeritus Professor John Wilson. A familiar character for many in the IPrA family, he was most recently the IPrA Treasurer.

 At Ulster, John was Professor of Communication and at different times Head of School, Dean of Faculty, and Director of the Institute of Ulster Scots Studies. He also held a number of visiting positions overseas during his career, including Professor of Communication and Visiting Adjunct Professor of Communication Disorders at the University of Southern Illinois. He had a great reputation for innovation and leadership, launching research projects and degree programmes that created opportunities for both students and fellow academics. In fact, all three authors of this obituary, to some degree owe their academic jobs to John.

 John’s route to academia was not a privileged one. He was the youngest of seven children. His father died when he was just two years old and at 18 years old, he left education to take up a job as a trainee accountant in an architect’s office. There, his academic potential was recognised and he was encouraged to return to education, but perhaps this route to academic life is part of what influenced John’s keen emphasis on “real world” issues, questions and challenges in his academic work. In his research, this was reflected in his interest in applying concepts from pragmatics and sociolinguistics to issues of politics and identity (e.g. his books: On the Boundaries of Conversation; Politically Speaking; Devolution and Identity; The Discourse of Europe: Talk and Text in Everyday Life; Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language; Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders). In teaching, for example, John created the BSc Hons Communication, Advertising and Marketing (CAM), putting into practice his firm belief that rigorous grounding in the study of language and communication creates practitioners with a deeper understanding of their professional practice and a greater capacity to adapt to evolving trends in the industry. The enduring success of the CAM programme and the dominance of CAM graduates in the communications industries in Northern Ireland is a legacy that John was very proud of. 

John had an impressively agile and enquiring intellect. While his core interest was in language in society, particularly political and parliamentary language, he was truly a ‘renaissance man’ in the extraordinary breadth of his academic expertise, interests, and applications.  Pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, marketing, sociolinguistics, advertising, semantics, formal logic, narrative, social theory, cognition, film, journalism, counselling, public relations, semiotics: these are just some of the fields of his interest and achievements, all of which were connected by a core recognition of the centrality of language and communication to human life.  As well as his roles in IPrA, John had been actively involved in a number of professional bodies during his career, including the European Communication Association, and the Institute of Public Relations. He was co-editor of the journal TEXT between 1998-2002 and was an editorial board member for the the Journal of Political Language.  Throughout his career, John also held research grants from a range of funders, including the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

John also brought profound vision to the academic study of Ulster-Scots. His leadership of the Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies proved instrumental in founding the worldwide reputation of the subject as a serious intellectual endeavour. His scholarship, verve and all-round ability delivered major projects, publications, and symposia that crisscrossed the globe in their ambition and reach. Underpinned always by his generosity, good humour and keen insight, he brought an infectious vitality and desire for excellence that touched upon every aspect of his professional life.

For all his personal successes in academic life, John’s greatest legacy is perhaps the influence he had on others. He was a gifted lecturer, who made complex ideas easy to grasp, and who engaged and enthused his students through his humour and dynamic interactional style.  Decades on, former students from many fields of communication recall with great clarity and fondness the impact that his lectures had on them and their subsequent studies/careers.  John also inspired many PhDs and was an outstanding supervisor! He combined a strongly supportive style with appropriate intellectual challenge, a combination which allowed all his supervisees to develop their own voices and to have confidence and independence in their ideas. And of course, they also benefitted from his famous humour and stories!  John was the kind of senior academic who was focused on actively providing opportunities for those coming up behind him. He facilitated many academic careers through his mentorship and advice, his generation of practical opportunities, and his consistent willingness to share his time, expertise, and authorship of publications. Since sharing news of John’s passing, we have been struck by how many people have got in touch to tell stories of John’s kindness and generosity in supporting them. He inspired and encouraged other scholars to be better than they ever realised they could be.

John was great “craic” - a brilliant storyteller with a great sense of fun. To spend time in his company almost inevitably involved laughter! He was also a “towering legend” and a “thoroughly decent bloke”. He will be sorely missed, but he will never be forgotten.

IPrA received the sad news of Claire Benjamins’ passing away on 22 September 2021. Over half a century ago, Claire was the co-founder, with John, of the John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Her generosity greatly facilitated setting up the International Pragmatics Association in the mid-1980’s. For decades she tirelessly contributed to the successful growth of the field of pragmatics with the publication of books and specialized journals. The company publishes the IPrA journal Pragmatics, the IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics, the open source Bibliography of Pragmatics, and has remained the primary sponsor of the International Pragmatics Conferences.

Obituary by Manfred Bierwisch, Berlin

Ferenc Kiefer, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, professor of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, former President of the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes, and President of the International Pragmatics Association from 1995 to 1999, passed away on November 21, 2020. The linguistic community has lost a particularly kind and helpful colleague and friend and a very competent and versatile partner. Ferenc was one of the most European linguists one can imagine, both in his scientific capacity and his way of life.

It began with his very identity. Ferenc Kiefer, born on 24 May 1931 in Apatin, Yugoslavia, came from the Swabian-German family Kiefer, who had settled in the Hungarian-Serbian borderline area Vojvodina, which for a long time had belonged to Austria and was shaped by this tradition. Little Ferenc thus spent his first couple of years in an environment where Hungarian and Serbian were the everyday dialects around his family home, his parents still sticking to their German tradition. It thus was quite natural for him, that before he had fully developed his mother tongue – which was actually Hungarian – he already knew German as well as some Serbian, which helped him to acquire familiarity with other Slavic languages on later occasions. With this colorful background, characterizing not only his early linguistic environment, but his cultural experience in general, he attended primary school in Budapest, where his parents had moved because of the changes that reordered the Balkans after the First World War. Budapest became in fact Kiefer’s real hometown, to which he returned from wherever he spent periods of his life in between.

After finishing graduate school in 1952, he left Budapest to become a student at the University of Szeged, where – besides taking some courses in French and German language and literature – his primary concern was to study mathematics and physics with the inspiring mathematician and logician László Kalmár, who was widely known for his contributions to mathematical logic and informatics and who had just founded a laboratory of cybernetics. Thus Feri, as he was quite naturally called by his friends and colleagues, did not begin his professional career the way one normally expects for a linguist. Instead of following the usual, still fairly conservative path of traditional philology, his interest in the nature and structure of language grew out of two strong and independent sources: first, his intuitive and informed familiarity with various languages of rather different types, and second, the advanced training in modern developments of mathematical logic and the theory of algorithms. This unimposed combination of two quite different capacities made him a highly estimated participant in the field of theoretical linguistics in his country, notably with respect to possibilities for machine translation, which attracted increasing attention during the 1950s and which were supported in Eastern European countries by the Soviet Union. Against this background, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences established a working group in mathematical linguistics with Kiefer as its leading research fellow. As a first approach, this group pursued the set-theoretically based approach proposed by O.S. Kulagina, whose basic idea was a variant of the categorial grammar conceived by Ajdukiewics and taken up later on by Bar Hillel, who, by the way, was one of the prominent guests visiting and encouraging the Budapest research group. As the expectations for practical results in automatic translation became gradually more realistic, the official support for computer-oriented linguistics reduced noticeably – not only in Hungary. Thus, the interest in linguistics returned to the more general and fascinating possibilities and perspectives opened by formal methods in linguistic analysis – the central field of Kiefer’s expertise.

Although he was never personally affected by the political pressures dominating the Stalinist era, it came as general relief, also for Kiefer, that in the Kádár-period, which followed the violent quelling of the Hungarian uprising, the political situation lost much of the earlier tensions. During the 1960s, Kiefer could step by step expand the range of his connections and the places of his activity. After initial visits to Stockholm, he became a long-time collaborator of Hans Karlgren, with whom he founded the research group KVAL (quantitative linguistics), working with him on the “slant-grammar calculus”, a new version of the system of categorial grammar. Staying in Sweden for a couple of years, he eventually held a chair in linguistics at the University of Stockholm from 1969 to 1981. From there he visited all linguistically relevant places in Europe which he had not already seen before. So, after Berlin and Vienna, he was a frequent guest in Paris, London, Rome, Pisa, and other places, but he also visited major universities in the United States. One of his lasting contributions from this period is his support for the establishment of the Journal of Pragmatics, which he served as the first review editor.

During the Swedish period, divorced from his first wife with whom he had a daughter in Hungary, he came to know Julia Janczyszyn, who had come from Poland under similar conditions as he had come from Hungary. It did not take long to become clear that Julia and Ferenc would stay together. They have two sons, whose life began in Sweden, much like Feri’s life had begun in Yugoslavia – a really European family.

Linguistically, Kiefer had in the meantime developed greater familiarity with the framework of generative grammar and its formal capacity, according to which categorial systems proved to be strictly equivalent to simple phrase structure grammars, providing the base-component of generative grammatical systems, which then were assumed to contain a transformational component. Fascinated by the new possibilities, Kiefer applied the framework of generative grammar to problems of different languages he was familiar with, notably Hungarian, but also Swedish, French, and German. At the same time, he was interested in aspects for which the framework of generative grammar needed further extension, such as the complex morphology of Hungarian or Russian. In the same vein, he later turned to questions of semantics or discourse structure from a generative point of view. These were the kinds of issues he was concerned with not only in his contributions to various books and journals, but also in his presentations at meetings and conferences he attended and, of course, in the lecture programs and during the extensive visits mentioned before. Besides his own contributions, he was very efficient and successful as an editor and mediator, creating a remarkable number of paper collections, which made interesting developments and results accessible to a wider range of colleagues, thereby strengthening their influence. But most importantly, it was the content and orientation of this activity, together with international acknowledgment and the resulting reputation, which also determined his academic position back in Budapest.

When he again took up his engagement as a research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, two different, but closely related things were of particular importance to him. First, he prepared and then initiated a systematic and theoretically based modern description of the grammar of Hungarian, an extensive – and actually quite successful – project, in which he actively participated. Second, he was very much concerned to develop the appropriate institutional basis for modern linguistic research at the Academy. To achieve this, he initiated the foundation of an Institute for Theoretical Linguistics, of which he served as the first director. Meanwhile he also held a chair as professor at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. As a matter of fact, a whole generation of Hungarian linguists were his students. His own work in linguistics in these years concerned almost all aspects of language and language use, and he addressed a wide variety of special topics, ranging from Swedish morphology to information structure, focus and modality, greetings as language games, questions and attitudes, noun incorporation in Hungarian, or thematic roles and compounds – to mention just a few. Systematic relations between different aspects of structure were as important to him as formal strength and reliability of analysis and explanation. Kiefer’s research as well as the prudent efficiency of his organizational steps in developing the linguistic institute of the Academy clearly influenced his role in the academic world. He was elected as regular member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, he also became an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, a member of the Austrian Academy and the European Academy of Sciences, and he received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa at the Universities of Stockholm, Paris, and Szeged.   

Ferenc Kiefer was elected the third President of the International Pragmatics Association, succeeding John Gumperz and Sandra Thompson, serving from 1995 to 1999, and organizing the 7^th International Pragmatics Conference held in Budapest in 2000. With his reputation and personality, Kiefer was the ideal candidate for an international organization like the CIPL. Although he really did not apply for it, he was the elected president of the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes from 2003 to 2013. In this position he was responsible for the international congresses 2008 in Seoul and 2013 in Geneva. Although he was skeptic about congresses of this general type and size (the last big one he attended was the 14^th International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp in 2015), compared to smaller conferences on more specific domains, he used all his energy to stabilize the CIPL-tradition.

Kiefer was in fact successful in several respects. Still before he returned to Budapest with his family, he was able to acquire a wonderful flat at one of the most spectacular places in Budapest – right on the Gellért-hill, looking straight down onto the majestic Danube. Linguists from all over the world have been guests in this famous place, enjoying not only inspiring discussions, but also the singular view.    

It would obviously be wrong to think of Kiefer only as a particularly successful linguist. He was in the first place characterized by his natural art of savoir vivre. He was not only a friend of the special Hungarian wines and the particular Hungarian (and French!) cuisine, he was a first-rate cook himself, as guests at his inviting place would attest with pleasure. But to Feri luxury did not just mean comfortable living. He was a real expert in all branches of art, a personal friend of active painters and sculptors, a regular attendant of opera, theater and concerts. His musical education was not confined to competent listening; he played with pleasure his own instrument, and it could happen, when you drove with him along a nice view, that he stopped his car, took out his violin and in the plain air he played a tune that enlightened the landscape.         

Ferenc was an unambitious character, not a man of great words or big slogans, he convinced his partners by what he did, without noise. His success sometimes appeared as a pure surprise, but in fact it was the result of skill, cleverness – and serious work. To his colleagues and especially to his students, he was remarkably friendly and supportive, he always thought of practical possibilities, invented topics to work on, found ways to solve problems and shared them generously. His large net of connections with colleagues, institutions, and projects permitted him practical help and advice in a large range of cases. He always had a smile, and he clearly preferred a joke over a complaint. 

While he had always stayed clear of political positioning in public, during the final years of his academic life, Ferenc did not hide his increasing disappointment with political developments in Hungary. In particular, he condemned the rude interference with the regular organizational structure of the Academy, too reminiscent of the autocratic tendencies of the past and, in his opinion, bordering on incompetence.

In the last few years, Feri suffered from a slowly worsening heart disease, which gradually restricted the range of his possibilities, including the visits to his summer residence in Kálocfá. As his situation became critical, he had to be taken to the hospital on 21 November 2020, where he passed away calmly and peacefully. All things considered, a fully lived and successful life. Feri’s relatives, friends, colleagues and students will preserve the lively memory he would want and deserves.

A recent obituary appeared in the Journal of Sociolinguistics 24(1) ("Social context and language: A tribute to the lifework of Susan Ervin-Tripp,"  by Amy Kyratzis), https:// doi.org/10.1111/josl. 12382

The following obituary was published in Berkeley News on 28 November 2018.

Susan Ervin-Tripp, a psycholinguist acclaimed for her pioneering studies of bilingualism and language development in children, native Americans and immigrants, died earlier this month in Oakland from complications of an infected cut. She was 91.

A widely cherished UC Berkeley professor emerita of psychology and an early advocate for gender equity in academia, Ervin-Tripp remained intellectually, socially and politically active after she retired in 1999, and right up until her death on Nov. 13.

Among other notable achievements, Ervin-Tripp, a 1974 Guggenheim fellow, discovered that people’s mindsets can change depending on the language they are speaking, providing new insights into the cognitive psychology of bilingualism.

“She was a pathbreaker, embracing new directions in the study of first-language acquisition as well as bilingualism,” said UC Berkeley psychology professor emeritus Dan Slobin. “In addition to groundbreaking scholarly work, she focused on the treatment of women and minorities, yet always using her psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic skills to provide a scientific foundation to her advocacy.”

Ann Kring, UC Berkeley chair of psychology, recalls how Ervin-Tripp’s steadfast activism led to the 1971 creation of the Academic Senate’s Standing Committee on the Status of Women, which later became the Committee on the Status of Women and Ethnic Minorities, of which she served as chair.

“This, along with actions by Sue and many other women on campus, led to significant increases in hiring of women faculty and movement toward pay equity between male and female faculty members,” Kring said. “She was a beloved member of the department, never shy to express her views but also keen to listen and understand others. She will be missed.”

Ervin-Tripp’s husband of 54 years, Robert Tripp, is a professor emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Love of food and family

Her passions included family, food, art and music, said her younger son, Nico Tripcevich, a laboratory manager at UC Berkeley’s Archaeological Research Facility.

 “She expressed her love for family by cooking spectacular meals, by producing berry pies in the middle of the night for a grandchild’s birthday using the pie-crust recipe of her grandmother, and by involving us in cultural activities she loved like museum visits and baroque music performances,” Tripcevich said.

Tripcevich’s wife, Cheyla Samuelson, said her mother-in-law had a penchant “for the word ‘delicious,’ which she would apply with equal relish to a piece of baroque music, a wonderful painting or a newborn baby.”

Despite being in her 90s, Ervin-Tripp’s passing came as a shock to family, friends and colleagues, especially those who had recently socialized with her. Margaret Conkey, a longtime friend and UC Berkeley professor emerita of anthropology, ran into Ervin-Tripp at a recent meeting of the Society of Women Geographers.

“She was in a lively mood at the meeting, and very active right up until the unexpected end,” Conkey said.

Keith Johnson, chair of linguistics, recalled how he came away from a recent gathering impressed by Ervin-Tripp’s humor and humility.

“She laughed about her own intellectual trajectory and remarked on the role of luck in it all,” Johnson recalled in a note to his department. “She was the only woman at the table when psycholinguistics was ‘invented’ at the 1953 Indiana Linguistics Institute.”

Early activism

Ervin-Tripp was born on June 29, 1927, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the youngest of two children born to Kingsley Ervin Sr., a vice president at Lyon Chemicals Inc., and Marian Moore Ervin. She and her older brother, Kingsley Jr., spent many summers swimming and fishing on a lake near Saint Cloud, Minnesota.

At 13, she published a defense of Cubism and Picasso in the Minneapolis Star Ledger. At Northrup Collegiate High School, she read literature in five languages and reviewed newly published works by Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, and James Joyce, according to her older son, Alexander Tripp.

As an art history major at Vassar College, she took classes in several disciplines and worked on Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign during her senior year. In a psychology course, she was asked to observe the interactions of young children for five minutes and describe what happened. That led to an epiphany that she recounted in a 2003 letter to the Vassar Quarterly magazine.

“I have been doing research for 50 years, and at the heart of it all is the extraordinary insight one gets from detailed observation,” she wrote. “In my case, it is of speech, as a psycholinguist. I study natural interaction, armed with tape and video recorders. I am sure the impact of (this) superb assignment was what steered me there.”

After graduating from Vassar in 1949, she began her doctoral studies in social psychology at the University of Michigan, earning her Ph.D. in 1955. She studied Navajo verbal behavior, among other languages, and taught for three years at the Harvard School of Education.

In 1958, she was offered a visiting assistant professorship at UC Berkeley, and drove there alone from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a Rambler convertible, camping in fields and abandoned farmhouses along the way. A year later, she landed a tenured position in what was then UC Berkeley’s Speech Department.

An avid skier, she met Robert Tripp at the Clair Tappaan Lodge on Donner Summit in 1963. They married in 1964 in Geneva, Switzerland. Their eldest son, Alexander, was born in 1965, daughter Katya in 1966 and son Nicholas in 1970.

At times, parenting clashed with political activism on the UC Berkeley campus, but she tried to take it in stride. During a 1970 protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, for example, a National Guardsman threatened her visibly pregnant belly with a bayonet as she tried to get to her office at Dwinelle Hall, she recalled in a 2016 interview for UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center.

“Mom seemed to have the energy of three people, because at the same time that she was breaking barriers on campus as a woman and pioneering research in her field, she was also raising the three of us,” Tripcevich said.

Groundbreaking research

Her efforts paid off. In a 1964 experiment, she showed a series of illustrations to bilingual French adults living in the United States and asked them to invent a three-minute story for each image. In describing each scene, the storytellers emphasized certain interpersonal dynamics in English and entirely different ones in French.

In a 1968 experiment of Japanese women married to American men in San Francisco, she found that the wives’ answers differed dramatically depending on the language in which the questions were asked. The results suggest human thought and feeling is expressed within language mindsets.

In 1975, Ervin-Tripp secured a faculty position in the psychology department, where she focused on early language development in mono- and bilingual children.

As her own children grew older, their language acquisition, jokes and insults became material for her research papers. She made presentations on such topics as “Gender differences in the construction of humorous talk,” “It was hecka funny: Some features of children’s conversational development” and “Risky laughter: Teasing and self-directed joking among male and female friends.”

Among other honors, she received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1974 and a Cattel fellowship in psychology in 1985. She was also a dedicated research psychologist in the Institute of Human Development and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. In 2000, she served as president  of the International Pragmatics Association.

In her 70s, Ervin-Tripp acknowledged that she was slowing down physically, and so would give her beloved downhill skiing one last go.

“It was apparent it might be necessary to stop because of arthritis, so I thought I would really enjoy that run,” she wrote in an email to her family. “Because at my age anything you like to do may suddenly be unavailable. But it is not sad. It just means enjoy. It’s like mindfulness training.”

That combination of tenacity, resilience and cheerful optimism is what made Ervin-Tripp so remarkable, family members said.

“She never fully accepted slowing down with age and had a fire of curiosity until the very end that she shared with everyone whose life touched hers,” said her daughter, Katya Tripp. “The intensity of the light of who she was is irreplaceable, and we miss her terribly.”

Ervin-Tripp is survived by her husband, Robert Tripp, of Berkeley; sons, Alexander Tripp of New York, and Nico Tripcevich, of Berkeley; daughter, Katya Tripp of Portland, Oregon; daughters-in-law Suzanne Murray and Cheyla Samuelson; and granddaughters Clara Tripp, Iva Borrello and Sofia Tripcevich.

A campus memorial to celebrate the life and legacy of Ervin-Tripp will be held in the spring. For more details about the event, email ervin.tripp.memorial@gmail.com.