A preliminary death notice for David Stampe, an old friend and hugely influential colleague in my work in linguistics. A first pass, deficient in many of the customary details about academic careers, reproducing the death notice on Facebook from David’s son John (with some amendments in square brackets):
David Lynn Stampe, June 13, 1938 – June 23, 2020
[Faculty positions in linguistics], 1966-2010
Specializing in Natural Phonology
Taught at The Ohio State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The University of Hawaii at Manoa [Associate Professor of Linguistics, retired]
PhD from University of Chicago [A Dissertation on Natural Phonology (1973)]
BA in Comparative Literature from Indiana University.
High School: Frankfort (IN) H.S. 1956
Eagle Scout for Boy Scouts of America
Family: Dr. Patricia Donegan (Wife), Dr. Dennis Stampe (Brother), John Stampe (Son), Elizabeth Stampe (Daughter), Marty Roberts (Son-in-Law), Aylen Roberts (Grandson), along with numerous other in-laws, nieces and nephews. [Also David’s first wife, née Nancy Beavers, John’s mother, now married to Scott Kesselmayer of Maumee OH]
My father was accomplished at many things. He was an accomplished long distance runner and outdoorsman. He was an avid world traveler who especially loved India. He is best known in his field for his theories in Natural Phonology and his research of the Sora language (India). He was also politically active, a gifted artist and a devout music lover who played both guitar and piano. He is preceded in death by his parents Wilson and Ruth Ellen Stampe.
He was also a supreme hacker (in the old, good sense), back from the early days of university computer systems and continuing throughout his life.
Intellectually, he was inclined to look at things afresh, following a few leading ideas wherever they led him, more or less relentlessly. Many people found this disconcerting.
From the summary statement in “Hypotheses of Natural Phonology” by Patricia Donegan & David Stampe, in Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45(1), 2009, pp. 1–31, the abstract:
Natural Phonology characterizes production and perception of speech in terms of a set of universal phonetically motivated phonological processes. Before their first words, infants identify some processes as inapplicable in their language, which narrows their perceptual universe to its phonemic system and enables them to hear the intention rather than the actuation of speech. They then gradually inhibit the inapplicable processes to achieve mature pronunciation. If some inhibitions are not fully mastered, the child’s speech seems to have a sound change, or perhaps a variable pronunciation, or a speech deficit. Processes that remain active govern allophony, variation, automatic alternations, one’s native “accent”, and one’s “foreign” accent in second-language learning. Inactive processes may (re-)emerge to cope with stresses like injury or fatigue. This paper surveys some of the principal hypotheses of Natural Phonology, and we briefly compare them with Optimality Theory and recent neo-empiricist phonology. We argue that abstraction from actions to intentions is fundamental to learning and understanding language at every level from phonetics to pragmatics.
David’s influence on my own work can be seen fairly dramatically in two papers of mine:
“Elementary phonology from an advanced point of view: A gloss on K&K” (Innovations in Linguistics Education, 1985).
“Rule interactions: Another gloss on K&K” (Innovations in Linguistics Education, 1987).
These are still favorites of mine. Yes, they were published in an extraordinarily out-of-the-way journal, but then no one else would have published such things.
David Stampe and Ilse Lehiste together were instrumental in bringing me to Ohio State in 1969. It’s hard to imagine two more janglingly disparate personalities, and this was probably the only time they collaborated on anything. But it was a good move for me, and I think I did some good things for OSU.
June 26, 2020 at 11:25 am |
From Doug Ball on Facebook:
Doug’s allusion is to David’s dissertation, which he embarked on before leaving Chicago for his first teaching position, at Ohio State (in, I think, 1966). He talked, spellbindingly, on the ideas in the dissertation, and amassed hundreds of pages of notes on them, in tiny, extraordinarily abbreviated diagrams written in his elegant script, but put off turning this material into text out of a demanding perfectionism. (At one point he told me he was making me his literary executor, to my deepest alarm, and I think he did, but then Patricia, with her keen intelligence and her practical approach to daily life, came along, so I was off the hook.)
Meanwhile the years ticked by, and his years of candidacy for the PhD at Chicago were running down, so that he was obliged to save his career by actually completing a dissertation, which he did with ill grace during the summer of 1973. He submitted it under the defiant title How I Spent My Summer Vacation (as cited in the 2009 Donegan & Stampe paper). After some, um, bargaining, he consented to the neutral title A Dissertation on Natural Phonology.
Maybe I should note that all the people centrally involved in this story led amazingly messy and fraught personal lives, and I was one of the stars (with an open affair with a male graduate student in 1970). Well, we were all young. The actual stories are some of them quite funny, and some genuinely instructive, but this is not the place to tell them.
June 26, 2020 at 12:34 pm |
Ok, one more story. David was passionately earnest, and could carry you away on those wings. Nancy Stampe told the story of trying to get David up one morning to go to teach at OSU. The alarm rang, and then rang later, and then rang once more, to no effect, so Nancy shook David, saying sternly, “David, you *have* to get up and get dressed!” David opened his eyes, looked at Nancy, and said, with utter conviction, “Nancy, I *am* up and dressed”, and for a few moments, she believed him, until reality returned.
June 26, 2020 at 1:05 pm |
With respect to David’s dissertation, it’s worth noting another factor. As I recall it, he had been offered a post-Doc at MIT for 1973-74. Only at the beginning of the summer did he learn that in order to take up a post-Doc, you had to actually be a Doc. Whether he would otherwise have just let the clock run out at Chicago isn’t obvious.
I knew him as a fellow student in Jim McCawley’s classes in 1964-66. When he arrived in Cambridge in 1973, working to get that dissertation done, I was occupying a folding chair at Harvard, and he contacted me to get a stack pass for Widener Library, for which I may have had to declare him my research assistant or something. [I think I have the years right, but I may be off by one].
We were never on the same page phonologically, but his work (what the world got to see of it) was immensely rich and valuable.
June 26, 2020 at 3:55 pm |
Another in-joke, “the folding chair at Harvard” — which I knew long ago as the Permanently Untenurable Assistant Professorship of Linguistics at Harvard, held by an extraordinarily talented series of linguists over the years.
June 26, 2020 at 4:07 pm |
From Geoff Nathan, who has twice tried to post this reminiscence, but was foiled by WordPress both times:
(Geoff is Geoffrey S. Nathan, Wayne State University Information Privacy Officer (Retired); Emeritus Professor, Linguistics Program)
June 26, 2020 at 5:35 pm |
Going to try once more, just to see whether the posting problem has gone away.
September 9, 2023 at 6:31 am |
I was reminiscing about my graduate student status in Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. David Stampe taught a class that I needed to take to graduate with an MA in 2007.
I decided to look him up, and arrived at this page.
I am sure to many of his colleagues, he was an esteemed scholar, but as one of his graduate students class, we could barely understand him – that is, his speaking voice. He muttered, often unintelligibly – we could barely hear him. After the first class or two, we figured, this was the norm. His colleagues in the Linguistics department at UH did not discuss him at all, and we all needed this class to graduate.
In his lecture, he could only teach his one seminal paper from Ohio State. That was the only assigned reading.
He gave us As if we showed up for class.
A research paper was *optional.*
There was not a single fact I walked away with, from that class in the Spring of 2002.
The students all thought he was quite mad.
I told the department chair of Linguistics about this, and since David was tenured, there was nothing he could do, and just shrugged. But the Chair’s anger toward the situation was unmistakable.
Since Dr. Stampe was a tenured faculty member, he was required to teach – the one course that was required to matriculate.
This is just my opinion of having to endure a professor who passed his prime many years before in a class where there was nothing of substance whatsoever.
I *was* a tenured professor myself while I was a graduate student in Linguistics – I was an Assistant Professor at UH-Hilo in the library, working towards a promotion to Associate Professor – this required that I get a second MA or PhD, and I took my sabbatical year 2001-2002 at Manoa to do this work.
I ended up getting the second MA, but later, took a job in the UH System as a community college professor that did not require the second MA or PhD.
I no longer believe in tenure – I believe in 5 year rolling contracts. Perhaps if UH had done that, we would have been spared Dr. Stampe’s obvious incompetence, and the coverup his colleagues did for him, for years.
Finally I can get this off my chest. As the Hawaiians say “Ua noa.”