It is with great sadness that we share the news that our colleague 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 was born April 11, 1952. She received her B.A. in Linguistics from Stony Brook University in New York in 1972 and her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. In 1986, she received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. Charles J. Fillmore as the 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 Cognitive Linguistics. Her dissertation was the first one to apply Frame Semantics to linguistic analysis. She became involved in the major research projects which Prof. Fillmore and his colleague Prof. Paul Kay undertook in the 1990s, 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) in 1997, 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. Over the last three decades, Dr. Petruck published over thirty articles on Frame Semantics, FrameNet, and the MetaNet project on metaphor in a variety of conference proceedings, edited volumes, and academic journals. In 2018, she published an edited volume on MetaNet. 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 maintained friendships and correspondence with a wide range of scholars and students, and frequently hosted visitors at her home in Berkeley.
Dr. Petruck held a variety of academic positions, including post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Visiting Assistant Professor at Peking University, Instructor at the University of California, Davis, and Senior Research Scientist at the FrameNet project at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. Dr. Petruck also held several invited positions, including guest researcher at the University of Gothenburg and Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her research was recognized by a number of awards, including a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (Israel), the Laurence Urdang Award of the Dictionary Society of North America, and an NSF grant to conduct a FrameNet workshop at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. More recently, she received a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award to create a FrameNet-inspired database of structured information about the experiences of Holocaust survivors.
Besides making valuable scholarly contributions to the theory of Frame Semantics and its practical implementation in the FrameNet project, Dr. Petruck had an enormous impact on how FrameNet was perceived by the international scholarly community. She was a key figure promoting FrameNet at academic workshops, conferences, and other events by talking to colleagues in lexicography, computer science, and theoretical syntax and semantics about FrameNet. She also set up the FrameNet group on Facebook and had maintained it for several years. She regularly established contacts with other research groups, thereby helping to build interest in FrameNet and conveying to colleagues what FrameNet is all about. Closer to home, over more than two decades, Dr. Petruck always had time to help undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars from around the world to get acquainted with the FrameNet project, and made sure that every newcomer to FrameNet felt welcome at the International Computer Science Institute.
Dr. Petruck is survived by a sister in New York, as well as a sister, a brother, several nephews and nieces, and her mother in Israel.
(Revised)
Collin F. Baker (International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley) and Hans C. Boas (The University of Texas at Austin)