William J. Frawley: In Memoriam

William J. “Bill” Frawley, born on September 17, 1953 in Newark, New Jersey, died of post-COVID-19 complications on February 14, 2021, in Rockville, Maryland. He figured prominently in DSNA throughout his career. Most of his colleagues thought of him as a linguist, not a lexicographer, but dictionaries were often in his mind, competing for attention with his many other interests.

Frawley was a leading linguist of his generation, publishing many articles and also several books, authored or edited. He took his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1979, with a dissertation titled The Structure of Academic Knowledge: Theory and Applications, which confronted the intersection of semantics/pragmatics and epistemology, a subject in the forefront of Frawley’s scholarship until the end of his career. His first publications also but less obviously grew from semantics: he translated the Russian/Belgian/French poet Alain Bosquet’s Instead of Music: Poems (Frawley 1980) and wrote a study of Translation: Literary, Linguistic, and Philosophical Perspectives (Frawley 1984). In the same period, however, he attended to more general linguistic matters, editing Linguistics and Literacy (Frawley 1982) and coediting selected papers from the First Delaware Symposium on Language Studies (di Pietro, Frawley, and Wedel 1983). Later books, such as Text and Epistemology (Frawley 1987) , Linguistic Semantics (Frawley 1992) , Vygotsky and Cognitive Science: Language and the Unification of the Social and Computational Mind (Frawley 1997) , and The Expression of Modality (Frawley 2006) extended and refined ideas that had preoccupied him since the beginning. Eight books represent a considerable contribution to our linguistic knowledge about knowledge and meaning.

Frawley was ambitious. For instance, he took on revision of the legendary linguist and editor William Bright’s International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (1992) in a four-volume Second Edition (Frawley 2003). But he achieved great things as a university administrator, too. He was Dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University from 2002 to 2006 and was briefly President of the University of Mary Washington from 2006 to 2007. He knew how to organize things—universities, fund-raising, edited books, journals, encyclopedias, learned societies—and not just the contents but the efforts necessary to produce those contents.

Frawley was neither a founding nor a charter member of DSNA, but he joined early in the society’s history, probably under the influence of Roger Steiner (who was a charter member; see Adams 2019, 54) at the University of Delaware, where Frawley began his teaching career. He appears first in a roster of DSNA members dated March 19, 1982. Over the decades, he served as a member of the Committee on Lexicographical Terminology, beginning in 1983, when he also served on the program committee of DSNA’s biennial meeting, which was held at Delaware. He joined the program committee of the 1987 meeting, at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, as well. He served overlapping terms as a member-at-large on the society’s executive board (1989– 1993) and on the editorial advisory committee of Dictionaries (1991– 1995), finally becoming editor of Dictionaries from 2006 to 2009. ¹ Had he never written a word about lexicography, members of DSNA would still remember him for his commitment and continuous service to the society and the profession.

But he did write about lexicography, a lot, and fostered a lot of inquiry into dictionaries by others, too. After all, dictionaries attempt to structure knowledge about linguistic meaning; thus, dictionaries were implicated in Frawley’s foundational interest. Most readers may connect Frawley to lexicography through his most recent major work on the subject, Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas (2002) , co-edited with Kenneth C. Hill and Pamela Munro, the scope of which says something about Frawley’s interests and influence. It is a big book at vi + 449 pages comprising sixteen chapters and an introduction. It ranges over many languages and their dialects, including Nahuatl, Hopi, Ojibwa, Cherokee, Ottawa, Huichol, and Nez Perce, and Siouan languages—just to name those mentioned in the table of contents—but also deals with a number of significant lexicographical problems, some of them structural, as...