In Memoriam Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjergarson

Gunnar
Hrafn Hrafnbjergarson was a visiting graduate student in the UCSC department, under the auspices of the Linguistic Research Center, for a good part of the academic year 2003-4. While in Santa Cruz he worked especially with Judith Aissen on topics in OT syntax and was engaged in many other aspects of the life of the department. He earned the BA in linguistics from the University of Iceland in 1999, then studied with Sten Vikner, first in Stuttgart, then at Aarhus, in Denmark, where he earned the PhD in 2004, not long after his return from Santa Cruz. He held a faculty position in linguistics at the University of Lund, in Sweden. Sadly, we learned recently that Gunnar passed away in August. He died in a drowning accident while diving with friends near the Swedish side of the bridge connecting Copenhagen with Malmø. Gunnar was a fine linguist (known especially for his contributions to the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project) and a kind and thoughtful person; he will be much missed. Øystein Vangsnes of Tromsø, who was a close friend, has written an essay in Gunnar’s memory, which is available on
his blog.