Geoffrey Nunberg

Geoffrey Nunberg died from brain cancer on August 11, 2020, at the age of 75. A linguist by training, but a polymath by temperament, his affiliation with Berkeley began with a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Human Learning in 1979. His most enduring association, however, was as an adjunct at the School of Information. There, in 2019, at the invitation of Dean AnnaLee Saxenian, who had brought him in to teach at the school fifteen years earlier, he gave the commencement address. In it, he described the school as inter-, trans-, multidisciplinary, diversciplinary or simply cross-silo. These comments not only reflected his pleasure at playing with words, but also why he and the school were an admirable fit. Faculty and students were beneficiaries of his remarkable ability to engage diverse communities. These included not only different scholarly fields, but also newspaper readers, radio listeners, and even Hell's Angels. In that odd last case, a group of Angels in a bar saw Nunberg taking notes on their conversation. They approached him threateningly, only to be enticed by his interest in their jargon, and ended up responding to his questions and asking him about his work. His ability to communicate across such a range of audiences was driven in part by his fascination with the oddities of language and his ability to fascinate others by discussing them.

Born on June 1, 1945, and a product of New York and environs, Nunberg went on to receive degrees from Columbia (B.A.), the University of Pennsylvania (M.A.), and City University of New York (Ph.D.), all in linguistics. But his education was not as linear as that list might suggest. He began as an undergraduate at Columbia, but soon turned to the Art Students League while writing scripts for soap operas. He left the League to return to Columbia, though his interest in art was lifelong. (He was also a keen musician, and while at Stanford in the 1980s formed a group, "Dead Tongues," with fellow linguists.)

 At Columbia, he developed his enduring fascination with linguistics, an interest he attributed to his father's meticulous approach to language as the son of an immigrant as much as to Columbia faculty. He went next to Penn, following in the trail of the pioneering sociolinguist William Labov. In the process he developed his own remarkable sociolinguistic skills, working in particular on socioeconomic aspects of language for his master’s thesis. New York, however, drew him back and he went to CUNY for his doctorate, working there with philosophers as well as linguists. His influential dissertation, "The Pragmatics of Reference" (1977), raised previously unnoticed challenges that polysemy presents to semantic theory. It explored how people resolve pragmatically what particular words are referring to when, logically, there are sometimes multiple options. To encompass such pragmatic understanding, Nunberg argued, scholars need to look beyond the ideal speech communities of conventional linguistics and philosophy and address instead contextual factors such as "collective beliefs of community," non-linguistic information, and the situated social practices in which communication is embedded.

Moving to the West Coast, he was affiliated briefly with UCLA and then with Stanford from 1980 to 2004, where he became a consulting professor of linguistics and a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, which published Nunberg's first book, The Linguistics of Punctuation (1990). He also spent time as a visiting researcher at the universities of Rome and Naples, drawing on his fascination with film to learn the pragmatics of Italian and intricacies of local dialects by spending afternoons at the cinema.

His dissertation and his ensuing research at Berkeley, and then Stanford, focused on punctuation and what it could reveal about the overlooked ways in which written and spoken language differ. He raised questions not only for linguistics, but also for pioneering work on the intersection of language and computation. As a consequence, in 1985, he was invited by a senior researcher to join Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a major contributor to both the ethos and the products of Silicon Valley. He worked here for the next 15 years, while PARC was expanding its multidisciplinary approach to research, bringing computer scientists into contact with other fields. This allowed Nunberg to investigate the language of the Internet and then the World Wide Web. In the process, he used this new corpus to help develop digital language-processing, genre-recognition, and filtering tools, for which he and colleagues were awarded three patents in the 1990s. These are still cited in patent applications addressing such issues. This work included pioneering filtering software called "Trollope," reflecting Nunberg's interest in nineteenth-century fiction as well as contemporary technology.

Throughout this period, Nunberg continued his scholarly research. The Linguistics of Punctuation, exploring previously overlooked differences between written and spoken language, influenced research into punctuation throughout the 1990s, and, with his work on genre-recognition, anticipated current research in Natural Language Processing. Though always working across fields, he published numerous articles in linguistics journals while continuing to explore, among other things, the significance of indexicality, deixis, and the materiality of communication. The last topic led to an important collection, The Future of the Book (1996), built upon a conference Nunberg organized in San Marino with Umberto Eco and Régis Debray. The book presciently scrutinized predictions about the effects of the dematerializing Internet on the material book and library. His own essay in the collection, "Farewell to the Information Age," was an argument about the "morselization" of information in the nineteenth century. Where information had previously referred to statements or whole documents, it came to refer to elementary particles of communications. Showing that this shift was a necessary precursor to digitization, the chapter is still widely cited in studies of information. In 2009, Nunberg followed up this work with an influential article on the ineptness of Google's Book Project and its attempts to build a universal digital library.

While doing research at PARC and Stanford, Nunberg was also actively engaged with the politics of language and linguistics. In the 1980s, when states such as California were exploring "English only" laws, Nunberg pressed the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) to speak out against such laws; he drew up a resolution on the issue, which was adopted by the Society in 1987. In the following decade, he urged linguists to resist attacks on "Ebonics" (or Black English vernacular), which the Oakland School Board had agreed to recognize, prompting another LSA resolution on this topic in 1996. The Society acknowledged his role in these and similar issues, honoring him with its "Linguistics, Language and the Public Interest" award in 2001. Just before his death, he was nominated as a Fellow of the LSA for his influence on the field.

Nunberg’s work on public aspects of language and the Internet continued as he fought the imposition of blocking software on connections to the Internet in public libraries, serving as an expert witness for the American Library Association in opposing the costive Children's Internet Protection Act in 2003. That year, a keen sports fan, he also provided expert testimony in a suit against the Washington DC football team for its use of “Redskins," which Nunberg argued was a slur (the topic of a later paper). He had previously argued against the team's usage in a trademark case – one of many such cases for which he provided testimony. After almost 20 years of litigation, the team implicitly recognized Nunberg’s argument when, shortly before he died, it agreed to drop the name. Nunberg was also chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, recruiting and working closely with numerous established authors. He also served on the editorial board of the Berkeley-based journal, Representations. Nunberg's scholarly and legal linguistic work reached a far wider audience than the LSA, the courts, and dictionary and journal readers, because from 1987 on, he regularly broadcast for the National Public Radio program, Fresh Air, bringing scholarly linguistics through his recrafting to a national audience. He became particularly well known for his choice of the word of the year. (His last choice, in 2019, was disinformation.) He also contributed regularly to newspapers and magazines, among them the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, American Prospect, Chronicle of Higher Education, New Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Atlantic. By both developing topics and republishing articles from these venues, he produced several popular books, The Way We Talk Now (2001), Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times (2004), Talking Right (2006), The Years of Talking Dangerously (2009), and The Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years (2012). These reached broad audiences and won several book-of-the-year awards from Amazon and various newspapers.

In the School of Information at Berkeley, Nunberg became an adjunct full professor, teaching several courses but focussing in particular on a doctoral course, "Concepts of Information," and an undergraduate course, "History of Information." He co-taught each of these over 10 years to numerous students, many of whom, noting the major effect he had had on their lives and thought, responded with sadness when they heard of his death. Though neither teacher was a historian, the latter course was surprisingly influential in that field, inspiring courses on the topic in several universities and leading indirectly to a forthcoming book Information: A Historical Companion (2021). The book involves more than 100 contributors, but at the center is Nunberg's last piece of writing, the entry on "Information, Disinformation, Misinformation." With his usual commitment and still-sharp intellect, he copyedited and proofread from his hospital bed.

His death is an immeasurable loss to his wife Kathleen, his sister, Barbara, his first wife, Anne Fougeron, and their daughter, Sophie. It is also a major loss to scholarship in a remarkable range of disciplines and to friends, colleagues, and students at Berkeley and around the world, as well as to listeners and readers of his always invigorating "diversciplinary" commentaries.

Paul Duguid
2020

Photo credit: Caitlin Appert-Nguyen