John Haiman
Professor Emeritus
Dr. John Haiman, professor emeritus of linguistics, passed away on April 7, 2025. He taught at Macalester from 1989 to 2017, imparting on his students his view of language structure as shaped by human creativity within the limits of cultural convention.
John received a BA in Slavic studies from the University of Toronto in 1967, then a master’s degree and PhD in linguistics from Harvard University in 1971. In 1989, John received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his study of sarcasm. In The iconicity of grammar: Isomorphism and motivation, John’s exposition of the role of iconicity in grammar (how the structure of language reflects conceptual ordering) would upend basic assumptions about language held up until that time. These insights were directly traceable to his fieldwork on the Hua language spoken in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea. Based on seventeen months of fieldwork in the 1970s, it was the first comprehensive reference grammar of a New Guinea language.
John advised his students that theories come and go, but that the most important way for a linguist to grow was to go learn a language entirely different from one’s own, to “go there, and find the linguist”—indeed, several would go on to conduct original fieldwork. With a particular fondness for Rhaeto-Romance, Hua, and Khmer (Cambodian) languages, his work remains influential in his demonstrations of how grammatical organization comes to non-arbitrarily parallel communicative purpose.
John’s personality was also one of delightful eccentricity, and colleagues and students recall his beloved pet pigs that lived in his house. Those who knew John as a linguist remember him as a polyglot, an out-of-the-box thinker, and cheerful iconoclast. He will be remembered as a wonderful teacher and impressive scholar, one whose intimidating intellect was matched by unusual absence of ego. (Many thanks to Dr. Joseph Brooks ’08, Dr. Stephanie Farmer ’08, and Dr. Kevin Schäfer ’15 for their contributions to this message.)