LUIS VICENTE REMEMBERED

The news of Luis Vicente‘s recent death has left the linguistics community at UCSC deeply saddened. Luis was an excellent linguist who made many important contributions to the field and he was a warm and loyal friend to many of us here. He was born in Bilbao in the Basque Country of Spain in 1979 and completed the PhD in Leiden in 2007, under the direction of Lisa Cheng. He spent 2008 in the Linguistics Department at UCSC as a postdoctoral researcher and formed in the course of that twelve months many lasting friendships and collaborations. It was here that he became an expert on ellipsis (particularly sluicing) and it was in the area of ellipsis that he was to make some of his many important contributions, often in collaboration with alumnus Matt Barros who was completing his MA at Santa Cruz in 2008. Luis seemed to be always smiling and always in the Stevenson coffee-shop and it was there that he met Amanda Shuman, a PhD student in history at the time completing a dissertation on contemporary China. It was Amanda who introduced Luis to the joys of trail running and they later made a family and professional life together in Europe — Amanda at the University of Freiburg, Luis at the University of Potsdam — with their daughter Emma. Luis was a person who faced life and work, and the challenges of living with brain cancer, with intelligence, humor, courage, commitment and warmth. He is sorely missed — as a linguist and as a friend.