James D. McCawley

Bibliographic Data

ID11114853
AuthorsJohn Lawler (0009-0005-3332-7995, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume79
Issue3
Pages614-625
Publication date2003-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lan.2003.0173
OpenAlexW2032850383
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

James D. McCawley John Lawler On Saturday, April 10, 1999, sometime between nine and ten p.m., while walking home from a concert in Hyde Park, James D. McCawley suffered a heart attack. He collapsed and was immediately taken to the nearby University of Chicago hospital, where, after strenuous efforts at resuscitation had failed, he was pronounced dead, at the age of sixty-one. Jim, as he was universally known to his students, colleagues, and admirers—comprising together a large percentage of the world’s linguists—was one of the great figures of twentieth-century linguistics, a recipient of practically every honor possible, a past president of the LSA, and a genuine original. He was greatly loved, and he is greatly missed.1 James Quillan McCawley Jr. was born into a Catholic family in Glasgow, Scotland, on March 31, 1938, the first child of Dr. Monica Bateman McCawley (b. 1901), a physician and surgeon, and James Quillan McCawley (b. 1899), a businessman. The family had planned to emigrate to America, and in 1939 James Sr. and two brothers went to Toronto and founded the McCawley Bros. Roofing Company, but with the arrival of the war Dr. McCawley felt her patients needed her in Scotland. She stayed there, with the children, for the duration, while James Sr. moved on to New York City, and finally to Chicago, where the family settled in Elmhurst after the war. Young Jim was eventually joined by a brother, John Frederick (‘Ricky’), and two sisters, Monica and Caroline. Jim spent much of his time in satisfying his boundless curiosity about everything; he was constantly in action, though often the action consisted of reading—he always had his nose in a book. He was close to his brother, and Ricky’s sudden death from leukemia in 1952 came as a shock. Sometime during this period he started studying languages; by the time he was twenty, he was able to support himself by translating Russian mathematical texts, and he spoke several other languages fluently. Eventually he learned to speak (at least) Dutch, German, Yiddish, Swedish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Hungarian, Mandarin, and Japanese. He also displayed an early interest in music, notably performing ‘Bumblebee Boogie’ on the accordion on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour at the age of nine, only two years after arriving in America. As a teenager, he worked part time as an Andy Frain2 usher at concerts all over Chicago, gaining, besides a little money and a great deal of musical experience, an encyclopedic familiarity with the Chicago Transit Authority, which was to serve him well in later life, because one component of a normal American youth never fell into place for Jim—unlike practically every other teenage boy growing up in Illinois at the time, he never learned to drive, and indeed had a lifelong aversion [End Page 614] to machines of all sorts. But he did eventually learn to play many musical instruments, including the clarinet, guitar, harpsichord, and piano. Jim had not been especially happy about moving to America as a young boy, but he did manage to take advantage later of one aspect of the move. As a minor, he automatically became an American citizen when his parents were naturalized, and he seized this opportunity to change his name officially to James David McCawley, losing the ‘Jr.’. Under any name, however, he was recognized early as very bright; he skipped several grades while attending parochial grade schools and St. Mel’s High School. Entering the University of Chicago (UC) in 1954 at the age of sixteen, under its early admission program, he progressed rapidly, gaining early admission also to the graduate school, from which he received an M.S. in mathematics in 1958.3 At this point he left the UC academic community for the first time, accepting a Fulbright fellowship to study mathematics and logic in 1959–60 at Westfälische Wilhelms University in Münster. It seems to have been expected that he would return to Chicago to study for a doctorate in mathematics, since there was reportedly considerable interest among the faculty there about whom he would eventually choose to study with. However, as he

Archaeology · Brother · Emigration · Honor · Political science · Spanish Civil War · Wife · World War II · Classics · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Law · Lexicography and Language Studies · Medicine · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Gerontology

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