Yesterday the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics announced that Robin Lakoff, a professor there from 1972 to 2012, has died. I really loved Robin's pragmatics class in grad school. She taught us so much about pragmatics, the history of linguistics, and various other stuff. Partly I thought she was amazing because she was a deeply shy, reclusive person, but she was hilarious in class. And her jokes weren't re-used, they were timely to current events. One thing I learned from her is that lecture can be a performance, like theater. Another important thing I learned from her was from sort of an aside during one lecture: a field can keep expanding the set of questions that are considered reasonable to ask, and this is good. A question that comes across as silly and uninformed, like no actual linguist would ask that, might be a reasonable topic for inquiry 10 years later. She explained how a lot of the questions we were doing research on in the 90's were not considered questions a linguist should ask back when she was in grad school in the 60's or 70's, but by the 90's there were whole conferences on the same questions. Like the kind of questions where the rest of the class might giggle uncomfortably, and your professor would try to steer you back onto something reasonable. That one little aside during a lecture comes back to me often. She also taught us Gricean maxims and conversational implicature and presupposition, in ways that just astounded me sometimes. I only took one class with her and she was never on my committees or things like that, but I really appreciated her and have thought of her often. #linguistics#AcademicChatter
