Anna Siewierska (bornGdynia,Poland, 25 December 1955, diedDa Lat,Vietnam, 6 August 2011) was a Polish-born linguist who worked in Australia, Poland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She was professor of linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English LanguageLancaster University and a leading specialist inlanguage typology.
During her youth, Anna Siewierska spent several years in Australia, while her father worked for a Polish trade company in Melbourne. She studied linguistics atMonash University underBarry Blake, writing an M.A. thesis onpassive constructions that was later published as a book[n 1] and was widely cited.[1][2]
From 1980, she worked at theUniversity of Gdańsk and took active part in the historic events surrounding the rise ofSolidarność, working as a link between the trade union's leadership and English-speaking journalists. She received her PhD degree from Monash University in 1985, with a dissertation onword order.[n 2][1]
She was married to the Dutch linguistDik Bakker. She died in a car accident while on holiday in Vietnam following a conference on linguistic typology in Hong Kong.[3]
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 invoice phenomena such as passive constructions[n 3] andimpersonal constructions,[n 4] as well as the grammar ofobjects.[n 5] She did extensive work on word order phenomena in the world's languages.[n 6] From the mid-1990s onward, much of her typological work focused on person markers such aspersonal pronouns andagreement markers.[n 7][1][2]
A complete bibliography appears inLanguages Across Boundaries: Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska, edited by Dik Bakker and Martin Haspelmath.[4]
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 incognitive 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. 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. (Available onlinehere.)
Siewierska, Anna. 2005b. Passive constructions. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, & Bernard Comrie (eds.),The world atlas of language structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Available onlinehere.)
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 & Dik Bakker. 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 & Jae Jung Song (eds.) 1998.Case, typology and grammar (festschrift for Barry Blake). 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.
^abcdeMartin Haspelmath,obituaryArchived 11 February 2012 at theWayback Machine (PDF), Association for Linguistic Typology. Accessed 25 May 2012. (Although the obituary is unsigned, its authorship byHaspelmath is clear from the site'stop page[as archived on 25 May 2012].)
^abcJohan van der Auwera,obituaryArchived 20 June 2012 at theWayback Machine (PDF), Societas Linguistica Europaea. Accessed 25 May 2012.
^abSarah Cunnane,obituary,THES, 22 September 2011. Accessed 26 May 2012.
^Bakker, Dik; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Bibliography of Anna Siewierska".Languages Across Boundaries: Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska. Berlin: de Gruyter. pp. xii–xx.doi:10.1515/9783110331127.xii.ISBN978-3-11-033103-5.
