C Cambridge University Press 2007 English Language and Linguistics 11.3: i–ii.
doi:10.1017/S1360674307002456 Printed in the United Kingdom Richard Hogg, 20 May 1944 – 6 September 2007 (Photo by a former student) It is with great sadness that we inform our readers of the death of Richard Hogg at the age of just sixty-three. He had been one of the three founding editors of English Language and Linguistics and was set to continue in the role until his retirement in 2009. His death has come as a great shock. We wish to share with readers of ELL at this earliest opportunity our appreciation of, and affection for, our fellow-editor, colleague and friend. When BA approached DD with the idea of a journal devoted to English language and linguistics, it very quickly became clear to both of us that Richard would be the ideal complement to our own, mainly syntactic interests. Richard embraced the idea of such a journal with enthusiasm, and in addition to his scholarly expertise, he brought all sorts of other advantages to the project: a shrewd understanding of the academic world, practical advice on the wording of proposals, an unrivalled knowledge of scholars in English linguistics and the world of academic publishing, and excellent relations with Cambridge University Press in particular. The journal would look for the best in English language scholarship, but with a constant eye to its relation with linguistic theory. The three of us kicked the proposal around among ourselves and with some of the colleagues who later formed the first Editorial Board, then put it to CUP in 1995; by 1997 the first issue had appeared. Richard’s postgraduate career had begun at Edinburgh with two contrasting academic preoccupations: the generative analysis of present-day English syntax on the one ii RICHARD HOGG hand (his PhD topic), and Middle English dialectology on the other (his research post). He went on to hold lectureships in Amsterdam and then Lancaster, before arriving in Manchester as the surprisingly young Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature in 1980 (where DD was already a junior member of the department). Not that DD recalls him ever teaching medieval literature: it was the first conjunct in his job title that counted for Richard, and it was rarely possible to get him to do anything that he didn’t want to. By the mid-1990s his primary academic research seemed to lie in Old English morphology and phonology, and also in English phonology generally – though the Cambridge history of the English language (1992– 2001), which he initiated as general editor, relied on a wider range of contacts and interests. Possibly through his own studies of Old English and his earlier work on what would become the Linguistic atlas of late mediaeval English, he was also becoming more interested in English dialectology. Phonology, morphology, dialectology: those were the areas that Richard concentrated on in his ELL editing, as we had decided early on to divide up submissions according to our own specialisms (a policy only made publicly explicit this year). In recent years Richard developed his interests in the history of English grammar writing and in the attitudes to language both of ordinary speakers and of scholars, and thus in aspects of the history of linguistics and philology, treated as cultural history. He was close to the completion of two books, the second and last part of his Grammar of Old English and a history of English dialectology, and he was planning a joint monograph with his newest colleague, Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, on the history of prescriptivism in England. Richard’s enthusiasm for the English language was tremendously infectious. BA recalls arriving for a social event at the Manchester Museum during the DELS conference in 2006 to find Richard standing at the foot of a copy of the Ruthwell Cross, animatedly explaining its significance to a number of delighted colleagues and students. His passion for English also shone through in postings on his English language blog, which he started in October 2006 in an ‘attempt to expose some of the many fallacies about English’. As a colleague, Richard was good fun, always ready for conversation and gossip, down-to-earth and unpretentious, relaxed and cheerful (if occasionally provoked to irascibility in meetings), supportive, helpful. Although he wore it lightly, he was always a thoughtful man, and time and again his judgement was proved sound. Both as an intellectual and as an organizer he was innovative and ingenious, often reflected in his body language as he argued his way through a tortuous sequence of ideas. As a teacher, too, he must have been good fun; certainly his students adored him. This brief appreciation is not an obituary: it will need more time and space to document his life and to list properly his many publications, achievements and interests. A Festschrift was already secretly on the way. Sadly, that will now have to be a memorial volume. And already there are plans for a prize in his name. For now, though, we wish to express our thankfulness for having been able to work so amiably and for so long with Richard, and our great sadness at his passing. David Denison and Bas Aarts, September 2007