Professor Emeritus Mike Geis passed away in December 2020. Mike joined the faculty at Ohio State in 1971, served as department chair until 1975, and retired in 1995. Mike was a central contributor to the syntax and semantics programs in the department and was a recognized leader in the scholarship of linguistic meaning in context.
Former professor David Stampe passed away in June 2020. David joined the faculty at Ohio State in 1966 and moved to the University of Hawai’i in 1984, where he retired in 2010. David was a central contributor to the phonology program in the department and was recognized as the inventor of the theory of Natural Phonology.
Fourth-year undergraduate Linguistics major, Thomas Graham, passed away in July 2020. Thomas was originally from Fairborn, Ohio.
Alumnus John Nerbonne (PhD 1984) shared the following reflection on Mike Geis and David Stampe:
Mike had a rough and ready style, but his good-old-boy exterior couldn't hide the lure language held for him nor his love of research and problem solving. He was intrigued by what was communicated even while not stated explicitly, and he tried to bring some of the rigor of formal grammar to the study of television advertising during the early 1980's. He was so enthusiastic about his work that he would stop some of us in the corridors to keep us abreast of his latest ideas. "'Less money for more car,' what does that even mean, Nerbonne?", he prodded loudly, appalled by the nonsense that was nonetheless concretely suggestive. During those times half of the department office was filled by a big table, and Mike was maybe the only faculty member who joined grad students there at coffee breaks and lunch times, always stirring up conversations on linguistics, sometimes provocatively. He would usually ask what you were working on, but if that conversation line petered out after a bit, he was always ready to try out his own new ideas on people. It was great how he kept an informal stream of linguistic gab going among us.
David was very different, more professorial in style (tweed jackets and cordovan shoes), but completely approachable, amiable, even self-deprecating in manner. The famous title of his dissertation "How I spent my summer vacation", suggests his way. He inspired a whole school of phonology, which propagated further in a related school of "natural morphology". David, too, was enthralled by language, and constantly puzzling not only about phonology, but also about typology, and he, too, enjoyed professional chit-chat, enjoyed taking initially superficial, even banal conversations to surprisingly abstract levels. He seemed to have non-superficial thoughts about most of the subjects that arose. After conversations with him, I wondered whether "Stampe's unpublished notes" would ever appear, and how many volumes they might take up -- on Old Icelandic, Mohawk and maybe all of Austroasiatic. What hadn't he worked on at least a bit? Years later, I read Neal Stephenson's foreword to David Foster Wallace's *Everything and more*, where he praises the faculty at "the midwest American college town", for making time for serious thinking about apparently whimsical matters. I had to think of David.
