Phonologist, Africanist, Typologist: George N. (Nick) Clements: (October 5, 1940 -- August 30, 2009)

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2010) Phonologist, Africanist, Typologist: George N. (Nick) Clements: (October 5, 1940 – August 30, 2009) Larry M. Hyman (University of California, Berkeley) To appear in Linguistic Typology; submitted February 27, 2010; revised March 2, 2010 On last August 30, linguistic typology lost a great colleague and a good friend, Nick Clements. Although known primarily as a theoretical phonologist and Africanist, Nick’s linguistic concerns were the same as many typologists, as he strove both to establish language universals and to characterize exactly how languages could differ from one another. On the way he put several major grammatical and phonological phenomena on the map and elevated others up to new heights. The five books and nearly 100 articles published during his career established Nick Clements as a unique scholar whose innovative approach to formal description and comparison resulted in deep and insightful studies which will continue to impact generations of scholars. Nick Clements received his PhD in linguistics in 1973 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His dissertation, “The verbal syntax of Ewe”, was just the first of several grammatical studies, in which he offered insightful formal interpretations of typologically significant phenomena, e.g. gerundive nominalization and verb serialization (cf. Clements 1975a), each time enlarging the scope of coverage to address new and deeper questions. Two further influential studies drawing from Ewe were his thorough-going investigation into logophoricity (Clements 1975b), and his ground-breaking study of the syntax- phonology interface (Clements 1978). Turning his attention to East African Bantu, Clements’ (1984a) rigorous work on binding domains and the focus marker ni in Kikuyu extended our understanding of the scope of focus marking in African languages and in general. While Nick’s last syntactic publication dates from over 25 years ago, his extensive phonological contributions start in the mid 1970s and continue to the end of his life. Work on West African vowel harmony systems (Clements 1974, 1977, 1981), as well on Turkish (Clements & Sezer 1982), not only helped establish the framework of autosegmental phonology, but also increased our awareness of the complexities. He would continue this interest in later developing a multilinear framework to do capture the properties and relationship between the ATR vowel harmony systems known primarily from West Africa and the vowel-height harmony systems further East in Bantu (Clements 1991, 1993). Also from this period is Nick’s extensive work on tone. Besides the aforementioned seminal work on the syntax-phonology interface (Clements 1978), which dealt with tone in Ewe, Clements & Ford (1979) and Clements (1984b) provide deep insights into the analysis of tone, with Kikuyu representing the extraordinary morphotonemic complexities found in Bantu languages. Nick rightly took a lot of pride in the important Clements & Goldsmith (1984) volume whose co-authored introduction laid out the basic issues in Bantu tonology. As Clements & Ford were developing their autosegmental analysis of (high tone) downstep as a non-linked low tone wedged between two linked high tones, Clements (1979) presented his first theory of tonal downstep, which he would follow up with a multitiered analysis of multiple tone heights and downstep (Clements 1983).