in Palo Alto, California, where he had lived for nineteen years after his retirement from Harvard in 1973, the year during which he served as the forty-eighth President of the Linguistic Society of America.Two years later he served as first president of The Linguistic Association of the U.S. and Canada, an organization to which he remained especially dedicated because of the compatibility between his views and theirs about the role of functionality in linguistic structure.He was eightyfour years old upon his death.He had known for almost a year that he was dying of cancer.Toward the end he suffered excruciating pain, but until March of 1991, when the cancer and the treatment for it made him too weak, he did not stop working at the same desk on the same old Olympia typewriter where he had worked throughout those years in Palo Alto.His files contained over 50,000 4 x 6 cards with fully quoted citations of anything he had read that he thought he might later like to refer to or include in his own writing.They sat in an alcove, converted from a closet, directly behind his swivel typing chair.They also contained voluminous citations of phrases he had collected by direct observation, carefully annotated as to time, place, speaker.(On the night he was taken to the Stanford hospital, he was listening to, and commenting on, the intonation of a policeman who was interviewing a victim of a traffic accident in the adjacent cubicle.)On the right as he faced his Olympia was a window looking into his backyard garden, neatly kept as part of his early morning routine.On the desk there were several pairs of woolen gloves to ease his arthritis, with the tips of the fingers cut out to make typing possible while wearing them.He complained of the cool occasionally damp weather of the Stanford area, preferring it hot.Not counting two revised editions of Aspects of language (1968 1 , 1975 2 , 1980 3 ), working there beside the window, he wrote six books, edited three more, and wrote just over one hundred articles and scholarly reviews.All this was AFTER he retired.There is a great deal to be said about Bolinger personally as well as professionally, because he was much loved by a large number of his peers.During the memorial services at the cemetery, numerous speakers commented warmly on what an incredibly responsible and helpful correspondent he was: when people wrote to him they got an answer, usually by return mail, and often just the kind of answer that they found immediately helpful.If I do not record some of these personal stories now, they will never be known to many people who will cherish them.I will therefore recount for the readers of Language more than just his professional accomplishments, trying to capture a sense of the man as well as the scholar.But first the basic facts of his life.Dwight LeMerton Bolinger (he preferred just the middle initial; the full middle name appears only in library catalogs which insist on that sort of detail) was born in Topeka, Kansas, on August 18, 1907.His father was Arthur Joel Bolinger, then an attorney, later a farmer, and still later a probate and mag
Robert P. Stockwell (Mon,) studied this question.