We are devastated by the news that our alum Shai Cohen (PhD 2009) passed away after a long struggle with cancer.
Shai was already an accomplished semanticist when he entered our PhD program. He stood out among his fellow students, who sought out his opinion and advice on academic and other intellectual matters. Shai’s dissertation was an ambitious enterprise at the interface of semantics and pragmatics. Following a common methodology in linguistics, he used a small and apparently insignificant phenomenon as a window into much bigger theoretical questions. He investigated the semantics and pragmatics of additive particles (like the English word “too” and its kin) to gain insights, not only into the kinds of requirements backgrounded meaning components (“presuppositions”) impose on the common ground of a discourse, but also into the way presuppositions interact with other meaning components. Through the window of additive particles, Shai tackled the toughest and most sophisticated puzzles in the theory of presuppositions, digging deeper into the puzzles raised by those particles than anybody had before him. Shai did not only easily master the formal aspects of the proposals he was making, he also had the ability to find and construct subtle and intriguing new data that led to genuine progress.
Shai was a popular teacher for introductory undergraduate linguistics classes at UMass. His teaching evaluations were among the best we get for those classes, which many students only take because they have to take a class requiring analytic reasoning. More than one student commented that Shai was one of the best instructors they had ever had. They loved his concern for them and adored his dry sense of humor.
Shai enjoyed doing semantics and loved being part of the linguistics community at UMass. One of his best forums was Semantics Reading Group, where students, visitors and special guests would drink, commiserate and try to understand semantics papers. From the onset, Shai was a mainstay of this event: always apologizing for somehow managing to be on time, unfailingly polite in his appreciation of the snacks on offer, devastatingly self-deprecating, whipsmart and yet appreciative of everyone’s ideas.He was always up for a chat, for a movie screening, for an occasional dinner with friends. Amherst was his home all throughout graduate school. It remained cherished in his heart ever since.
Throughout the UMass years and beyond, Shai remained a constant point of reference for so many of his fellow students, who feel very lucky to have been his friends. It was impossible not to love Shai: he was terrifyingly smart, but also extremely humble; he had a sharp, dry, sense of humor, and was at the same time kind and caring. Classmates and friends affectionately called Shai ‘the Master’, and a true one, he was: not only because he was generous in sharing intellectual insight—always in a sharp but gentle way; always with a funny and surprising twist—but also, and mostly, because he enjoyed showing us how to look at things differently: a treasured lesson that Shai left for us is that hope can come from understanding that possibilities are boundless, and reality is what one makes of it.
