Stanley Starosta, professor of linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, died July 18, 2002, in Honolulu, from heart disease. He was 62. He is survived by his wife, Aleli; their son, Stuart; a granddaughter; and two brothers, Noel and Bill. No services were held. Born in Wisconsin, he received a B.A. in Physics (1961) and Ph.D. in Linguistics (1967) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor Starosta spent extended periods doing research, teaching, and field work in East, Southeast, and South Asia, and Western Europe. His primary area of research was Lexicase, a highly-constrained dependency grammar he developed. He also worked on natural language processing; morphological theory; and the synchronic analysis and historical reconstruction of languages of East, Southeast, and South Asia and the Pacific. An expert in Austronesian linguistics, he wrote countless papers and gave innumerable presentations on Formosan languages; much of his work was based on his own field work in Taiwan. In addition to his work on Proto-Austronesian, he also did research on the prehistory of other languages of E/SE/S Asia and the Pacific. Additionally, he had considerable expertise in Chinese languages, German, Japanese, and Thai. He devoted much of his effort to issues in syntactic theory, such as case relations, ergativity and transitivity, and focus. His morphological theory, also highly constrained, holds that words have no internal structure, and, in essence, that the only morphological rule is analogy.

Professor Starosta, know as "Stan" to his students, colleagues, and friends, was also possessed of a razor-sharp wit. He composed several humorous songs and countless limericks, and was found of telling jokes at Friday afternoon gatherings at a local bar in Honolulu, where linguistics students and faculty alike would come together to talk and joke over peanuts and beer.

Blaine Erickson