Anna Siewierska (born Gdynia, Poland, 25 December 1955, died Da 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 Language Lancaster University and a leading specialist in language typology.
Anna Siewierska
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| Born | (1955-12-25)25 December 1955 |
| Died | 6 August 2011(2011-08-06) (aged 55) |
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| Spouse | Dik Bakker |
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| Doctoral advisor | Barry Blake |
| Website | Siewierska on the website of Lancaster University |
During her youth, Anna Siewierska spent several years in Australia, while her father worked for a Polish trade company in Melbourne. She studied linguistics at Monash University under Barry Blake, writing an M.A. thesis on passive constructions that was later published as a book[n 1] and was widely cited.[1][2]
From 1980, she worked at the University of Gdańsk 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 PhD degree from Monash University in 1985, with a dissertation on word order.[n 2][1]
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.[1][3]
She was married to the Dutch linguist Dik 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 in voice phenomena such as passive constructions[n 3] and impersonal constructions,[n 4] as well as the grammar of objects.[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 as personal pronouns and agreement markers.[n 7][1][2]
Siewierska contributed significantly to building bridges in linguistics between different schools. She had 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,[n 8] from corpus linguistics,[n 9] and from cognitive linguistics and construction grammar.[n 10][1][2]
A complete bibliography appears in Languages Across Boundaries: Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska, edited by Dik Bakker and Martin Haspelmath.[4]