With great sadness, we report that Susan Ervin-Tripp, the celebrated Berkeley sociolinguist and psycholinguist, has died at age 91. Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychology, Susan Ervin-Tripp was an innovative and interdisciplinary scholar, having also taught in Rhetoric and Women’s Studies during her Berkeley career. She was devoted to the study of language broadly, but with particular interests in bilingualism, child language development, discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Her work was extremely influential and broadened the thinking of many generations of Berkeley students and colleagues in many fields. Her presence, and her passion for language and social justice, will be dearly missed.
Sue’s longtime friend and colleague Dan Slobin reports that Sue recorded an oral history for the UC Library. A link to both the recording and a transcript may be found here.