Anne Vainikka died on 11 June 2018, of cancer. At the time of her death, she was an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Her professional accomplishments are matched by her personal virtues—strength, good humor, and devotion marked her commitments.  She was widely known as someone who marched forward, following ideas where they go, but with grace, determination, no untoward bombast or self-promotion, and just straightforward arguments.

Anne received her Ph.D. in 1989 in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts/ Amherst, with a dissertation on Finnish syntax, the second dissertation ever on this topic and one which has provided the groundwork for most work on generative Finnish syntax since then.

She followed this with a series of publications on aspects of Finnish syntax including partial null subjects, structural case and long distance case, and had started to work on the Finnish -KIN particle. She was working on a project on Uralic Syntax and will be missed by the vibrant new community she helped create and which she was leading; this community crossed disciplinary and paradigm boundaries by drawing modern syntacticians, traditionally trained Uralicists, typologists, field linguists and endangered Uralic language speakers of languages ranging from her native Finnish to Enets, Erzya, Estonian, Hungarian, Inari Saami, Khanty, Mansi, Mari, Nganasan, Selkup and Udmurt.

During her PhD Anne began with Tom Roeper and Jill de Villiers to work on child language acquisition, and she solo- and co-authored a number of well-received publications. Her work on second language acquisition began in the late 1980s as a researcher on a project led by Harald Clahsen. She became well known with Martha Young-Scholten for work based on adult immigrants’ acquisition of German, which culminated in their theory of Organic Grammar. They had recently turned to the acquisition of English.  Her eye for long-standing problems led her to establish The Verb Company to introduce the English spelling system to emergent readers in a much more systematic way.

Anne actively mentored young scholars; her PhD student Taija Saikkonen defended her thesis in Helsinki a few weeks before Anne died. Newcastle University PhD student, Dongyan Chen, benefitted considerably from Anne’s advice on applying Organic Grammar to L2 Mandarin.

Anne is survived by her husband, Inigo Thomas, director of Technology Solutions at the Port of Wilmington, Delaware, their sons Aksel and Ashok, of 528 Old Elk Neck Road, Northeast, Maryland 21901, and by seven sisters and a brother.

Services were held on Saturday June 16, at 11 a.m. with visitation at 10 a.m. at the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, 2038 Pleasant Valley Road, Newark DE 19702.