We are sad to share the news that Dr. Miriam R. L. Petruck died April 1, 2025 after a brief hospitalization. A memorial service was held for her two days later at Congregation Beth Israel in Berkeley, California, where she had been a member for many decades, followed by interment at Gan Shalom Cemetery in Briones, California.
Dr. Petruck received her Ph.D. in Linguistics at University of California, Berkeley in 1986; Prof. Charles J. Fillmore was head of her dissertation committee. Her dissertation on Hebrew body-part metaphors combined two of her lifelong interests, the scientific study of the Hebrew language and the Cognitive Linguistic approach to metaphor. She became involved in the major research projects which Prof. Fillmore and his colleague Prof. Paul Kay undertook in the 1990's, developing the twin theories of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar. She participated in the discussions leading to the creation of the FrameNet project (the practical implementation of Frame Semantics) helping to define frames and to annotate some of the data in the FrameNet database.
For the rest of her life, she continued to publish and speak about both theories (particularly about Frame Semantics and its application to NLP), at conferences and seminars around the world. She visited and wrote papers with co-authors from many countries based on applying these theories to English, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Hebrew, and other languages. She also established the FrameNet group on Facebook and had maintained it for several years. She maintained friendships and correspondence with a wide range of scholars and students, and frequently hosted visitors at her home in Berkeley. She recently received a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award to create a FrameNet-inspired database of structured information about the experiences of Holocaust survivors.
-- Collin Baker