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  • Irit Meir:An Obituary
  • Wendy Sandler

"It is about who we are when we are not rehearsing to be who we are."

Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

Irit Meir was born in Jerusalem, Israel on August 18, 1957. Her interests and experiences were multi-faceted, but there was a coherent core that radiated throughout her life. Two of Irit's central traits interacted so intimately that they were sometimes indistinguishable from each other: the scientific pursuit of knowledge about the nature of human language, and a profound, instinctive, and empathic engagement with other human beings.

After completing her MA in English Linguistics summa cum laude at Hebrew University in the late 1980s, Irit spent a few years in the United States with husband Ronny, enjoying time with their three small daughters. Although she excelled in her studies, spoke several languages, and came from a prominent academic family, Irit didn't immediately find burning interest in a field of study that would justify devoting a career to academic pursuits. That is, until she bumped into sign language. It was a book she came across, What the Hands Reveal about the Brain by Poizner, Klima, and Bellugi, that changed everything. Her first step in what was to become a rich career was to enroll in an American Sign Language course in Los Angeles.

Irit and I had previously taken a semantics course together as MA students at Hebrew University, where I had given a student presentation about sign language. Years later now—this was around 1990—newly fascinated with the importance of sign language to the understanding of language generally, and ready to return to Israel with her family, Irit wrote to me, then a junior faculty member at the University of Haifa. She asked if I needed a research assistant. I promptly applied for and received my first research grant ever; Irit joined me [End Page 671] as an RA, soon going on to complete a PhD at Hebrew University, teaching first at Oranim Teachers College, and then landing a faculty position at the University of Haifa. All the while she contributed significantly to the development of the Sign Language Research Lab, on both scientific and human levels, which were never separate for Irit. On the scientific level, Irit confronted central properties of sign languages that illuminate the interaction between the nature of language and the effect (or non-effect) of modality—such as the use of space, iconicity and its interaction with metaphor, and the principles behind the ordering of words within propositions. She endeavored to explain these phenomena rather than simply to name them. In her doctoral work on verb agreement in Israeli Sign Language, Irit noticed that the direction of movement of the hands, and the part of the hand that faced the target, were separable but interacted with one another. She showed that the phenomenon of verb agreement is neither strictly syntactic nor strictly semantic, but is best understood as an interaction of the two: The hands move from source to goal, but they typically face the syntactic object, which could be either source or goal. Adopting the model of lexical conceptual structure proposed by Ray Jackendoff for spoken language, Irit argued that, though the instantiation of verb agreement has modality-specific properties, it can be captured neatly within general theory, and is therefore understood as an explicitly linguistic phenomenon. Sign languages exploit iconicity more than spoken languages do; that is a platitude in our field. But Irit realized that iconicity is a complex phenomenon, and that like other aspects of language, it is subject to constraints. She turned to metaphor, a device exploited extensively by both spoken and signed languages. Unlike typical spoken words, basic signs are inherently made up of iconic components which themselves are often understood metaphorically. Irit investigated the interaction of metaphor and iconicity in sign language, asking whether signs were subject to metaphorical extension in the same way as spoken words. She discovered that signs can be metaphorically extended, but not in the same way as spoken words, and identified the interaction between two kinds of mapping, positing a double mapping constraint.

Many signs consist of iconic mapping between the...

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