George W. Grace
George William Grace was an American ethnolinguist and anthropologist, best known for his contributions to the historical and comparative study of the Oceanic languages of Melanesia. In 1961, he helped found the academic journal Oceanic Linguistics and served as its first editor-in-chief for thirty years. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in the study of the Oceanic languages' histories and interrelationships.
Born in Corinth, Mississippi, Grace grew up on the state's Gulf Coast and initially studied music in college. In 1942, he joined the Army Air Corps following the attack on Pearl Harbor, serving as a flight navigator with the 304th Troop Carrier Squadron. After the war, he settled in Switzerland to study French, German, and political science at the University of Geneva. With Joseph Greenberg as his doctoral advisor, Grace completed his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1958, though Isidore Dyen attempted to thwart the defense. His thesis was later published which met with immensely positive critical reception and became a touchstone for Austronesian linguistics. After five years teaching in the North Carolina and Illinois, he accepted a full professorship from the University of Hawaii, where he remained until his retirement in 1991.
Grace's work touched on a number of subfields, but focused largely on the interaction of synchronic and diachronic analyses, and how linguistic phylogeny can be obfuscated by different kinds of sound changes. He dismissed earlier attempts at phylogenetic research which focused largely on lexicostatistics, which he believed was subordinate to sound change and led to his promulgation of the "aberrant–exemplary" distinction to describe the concept. Grace was also recognized for his work on the philosophy of language, especially on translation studies and the nature of language as a message rather than as a code.
Early life and education
George William Grace was born in Corinth, Mississippi, near the Tennessee border, on September 8, 1921, the eldest of three boys born to George Grace, a postmaster, and his wife. The family moved to a farm in Orange Grove, a suburb of Gulfport, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, shortly before George began school. Following his high school graduation, he attended Perkinston Junior College just north of the city, majoring in music.Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Grace enlisted the following year in the Army Air Corps and served as a flight navigator for the 304th Troop Carrier Squadron in the North African campaign, the Allied invasion of Sicily, and the following push through the rest of Italy. He became a commissioned officer in November 1944.
Grace was discharged in the summer of 1946, but remained in Europe, deciding to move to Switzerland in part because he had been trying to learn French and German, and in part because "it was one of the few countries that were functioning fairly normally" after the war. In order to attain a Swiss visa, he enrolled in a French language program at the University of Geneva which had no academic requirements.
At 27, he had earned his licence-ès-sciences politiques, mention études internationales at the University of Geneva in 1949. The same year, he enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University in New York City.
Career
Following his graduation, Grace was offered a position as a junior research anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. With no substantive background or training in the field, it is unclear how the offer came to be; his former student Robert Blust suggests he may have simply been well-read enough that it justified his hire. During his time at Berkeley, he spent the summer of 1951 studying the Luiseño people of California with Alfred L. Kroeber, culminating in a grammar of their Uto-Aztecan language. He was later promoted to research associate and by 1953, he was working with the Tri-Intitutional Pacific Program, a collaborative effort between Yale University, the University of Hawaii, and the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.Hired by Yale University as an anthropology research assistant the year before, Grace's first foray into Oceanic linguistics began in 1955 when he began a linguistic survey of New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, and colonial holdings in New Guinea. Grace returned the following year with fieldwork from dozens of languages.
In 1958, Grace defended his thesis, advised by Joseph Greenberg. Recognizing his eminence in the field, Grace had invited the American Oceanicist Isidore Dyen to be an external member of the dissertation committee, despite his well-known reputation for being ill-tempered. Dyen was the only member of the committee who refused to accept the thesis. In spite of the attempted thwarting, Grace's thesis was ultimately accepted following Dyen's withdrawal from the committee. Grace published his thesis the following year to immensely positive critical reception.
Following his doctoral degree, Grace was hired as an assistant professor of sociology at the Women's College at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro for the 1958–1959 school year. The following year, he moved to the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, to teach anthropology at Northwestern University for another year. From 1960 to 1963, Grace was hired as an associate professor of anthropology at the Southern Illinois University at the opposite end of the state in Carbondale.
In the fall of 1961, Grace began efforts to fill a gap in scholarship, feeling that Oceanic linguistics had an opportunity to band together and push past colonial-era roadblocks. The result was the organization and publication of Oceanic Linguistics, an academic journal dedicated to the study languages in the Pacific. Grace had been chosen as the journal's first editor in part because of his position in the United States; supporters felt it had a more concerted interest in languages, though Grace later recounted that supporters may have also had "a perception that funding might be more available" in the country. Isidore Dyen expressed no interest in the journal at all and no other professors were American, so the duty fell to Grace. For his part, Grace was happy to accept the editorship, in part because he believed he would be able to influence the direction of the field at large from such a central position, and in part because he believed his editorship would convince Southern Illinois University to help fund the project.
In 1964, Grace received an offer from the East–West Center to be a scholar-in-residence at the institution in Hawaii; at the end of his one-year stint, he accepted a full professorship at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa's nascent linguistics department. Shortly after his arrival, he began receiving bills for loans he was unaffiliated with and letters of abuse from the locals based on the misapprehension that he was another man by the same name, an entrepreneur who had invented a portable flushable toilet. Following Grace's move to Hawaii, Oceanic Linguistics publication moved with him. Two years afterward, he entered a three-year stint as chairman of the Department of Linguistics after became a dean.
Later years and death
In 1991, Grace was presented with a Festschrift, entitled Currents in Pacific Linguistics: Papers on Austronesian Languages and Ethnolinguistics in Honour of George W. Grace with an introduction from Robert Blust. The same year, he appointed Byron W. Bender to replace him as editor-in-chief of Oceanic Linguistics and retired from his professorship, though he continued to teach in a low-load professor emeritus capacity.On January 17, 2015, Grace died at St. Francis Hospice in Honolulu from myelodysplastic syndrome which ultimately developed into leukemia. A few days before his death, he told Blust: "This is a notoriously good way to die. No pain at all. Don't feel sorry for me."
Scholarship
Grace innovated several different ideas about language during his career, particularly the interface between synchronic and diachronic analysis, and analyzing language through meaning rather than as a code. In summarizing Grace's contributions, Blust wrote:In historical linguistics, Grace was largely responsible for one of the first major undertakings in Proto-Oceanic lexicography, compiling a massive amount of reconstructions from earlier sources in his 1969 Proto-Oceanic finder list based on a 1965 work of his own.
Aberrant and exemplary distinction
Throughout his study of the languages of Melanesia, Grace felt that there were differences in their developments that could be roughly divided into two camps: "aberrant languages" and "exemplary languages", though he stressed that the two formed a continuum rather than a dichotomy. Originally jokingly called "bad languages", aberrant languages were those with few identifiable cognates because they had gone through numerous or complicated sound changes, obfuscating their phylogenetic position in the language family. Examples of this in the Oceanic languages include Kaulong of New Britain and Aneityum in southern Vanuatu, though Albanian in the Indo-European language family and Blackfoot in the Algonquian language family have also been cited as examples of aberrant languages. Grace described aberrancy as a language having at least one of the following:- Relatively small numbers of cognates with other languages in the Austronesian family
- A substantially distinct phonological development, especially one which makes cognate identification more difficult
- An atypical grammatical structure
- Difficulty in distinguishing inherited from borrowed vocabulary, often as a result of obfuscating sound changes