Re: RT list: Sad news - Prof Regina Blass passed away

Thanks for let us know about this sad news.

Nelson

> On May 19, 2015, at 3:16 AM, Manuel Padilla Cruz <mpadillacruz@us.es> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> Just in case you do not know this, I have heard from Helga Schröder that Prof. Regina Blass passed away at the beginning of May, while undergoing treatment at Nairobi Hospital. What follows is a brief note on Prof. Blass' career taken and adapted from her obituary, which Helga Schröder kindly sent to me.
>
> Born in Wuppertal (Germany) in 1943, Prof. Blass started her career as a business manager’s assistant at Kolb and Company screw factory at Wuppertal in Germany in 1961. In the 70s, she started to work for Wycliffe Bible Translators (Germany) and began her training in linguistics. She next went to Ghana in order to work with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) as a researcher and translator in the Sissala language project in northern Ghana. After completing her MA degree in 1980, she moved to Leo (Burkina Faso) and continued working on the Sissala language.
>
> Prof. Blass completed her PhD in linguistics at University College London (UCL) in 1988, under the supervision of Prof. Deirdre Wilson. Her study on Sissala particles from a relevance-theoretic perspective became widely known and is often quoted by many relevance theorists. She continued working in the same project until 1991, when she settled in Ouagadougou to serve as a linguistics consultant and Director of Academic Affairs for SIL in Burkina Faso. In 1995, she moved to Niamey and became Director of Academic Affairs for SIL in Niger. There she taught courses in linguistics at the University of Niamey and contributed to the translation of The New Testament into Sissala by analysing and describing this language.
>
> In 1999, Prof. Blass moved to Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) and took up a teaching position as a professor in the Translation Studies Department, where she served for sixteen years. Later on, she became Head of Department at Africa International University. Under her guidance, the department changed its name to the Department of Language, Linguistics and Communication and new programmes in linguistics, translation and language teaching were developed. At the time of her death, she was Acting Dean of the School of Education, Arts and Social Sciences.
>
> Throughout her academic life she attended and actively participated at many conferences on pragmatics. She presented and published many papers in this field, and helped many students and researchers to attend those conferences. Prof. Blass' work in linguistics is acknowledged world-wide and her kind and loving personality and closeness will certainly be remembered and missed.
>
> Kindest regards,
>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Manuel Padilla Cruz
> Departamento de Filología Inglesa (Lengua Inglesa)
> Facultad de Filología - UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA
> c/ Palos de la Frontera, s/n.
> 41004 Sevilla (Spain)
> mpadillacruz@us.es <mailto:mpadillacruz@us.es>
>
> http://personal.us.es/mpadillacruz/ <http://personal.us.es/mpadillacruz/>
>
> Co-Editor - CSP Series Advances in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis
> http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/series_14.htm <http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/series_14.htm>
Received on Tue May 19 16:11:24 2015