Ronald Richard Butters (81) passed away in his home on April 6, 2021 after a long battle with cancer.
– About the deceased:
Ron was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in February 1940. After achieving his PhD at the University of Iowa, he moved to Durhan, NC, to begin his 40 years career at Duke University and held a joint appointment in the Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke. Following his retirement from Duke University in 2007, he developed a consulting firm called Trademark Linguistics and continued working in the field with many distinguished law firms.
– In his own words:
“I concluded forty years of professional service in teaching and research at Duke University in September, 2007. For over twenty-five years I have consulted with law firms and served as an expert witness in matters concerning linguistics and the law, and I continue to offer my services as linguistic expert specializing in trademark issues (strenght of mark, likelihood of confusion, word history, dilution, putatively scandalous marks), interpretation of the language of contracts and statutes, allegations of defamation, verifiability of confessions and interrogations and the interpretation of linguistic evidence — spoken, written and electronic”.
At the invitation of the editors of the two Forensic Linguistics journals, Language and Law and IJSLL, Ed Finegan has written an affectionate and very informative obituary entitled ‘Remembering Ron Butters’. This will be published in the next issue of both journals and will appear before that as a pre-print on the journals’ websites. You can access it here: http://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/LLLD/issue/view/694
– Some books and articles Butters wrote or contributed to:
- The Death of Black English: Divergence and Convergence in Black and White Vernaculars
- Displacing Homophobia
- “Forensic Linguistics“
- Language Variety in the South Revisited
– Link to the video: “Ronald Butters on Forensic Linguistics”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLcBFSQvGnw&t=1s
– You can also access Ron’s entertaining piece ‘How I got started in forensic linguistics’, at: http://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/LLLD/issue/view/680
– Ohter links of interest:
http://trademarklinguistics.com/Home.html
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/English/faculty/amspeech
http://www.forensiclinguistics.net/interviews-butters.html
http://trademarklinguistics.com/Publications_and_Links_files/Butters_credentials.pdf
http://trademarklinguistics.com/Publications_and_Links_files/Butters%20Plenary%20COMPLETE.pdf
https://duke.academia.edu/RonaldButters
– Where we found this information:
– http://trademarklinguistics.com/Home.html
– https://www.clementsfuneralservice.com/obituaries/Dr-Ronald-Richard-Butters?obId=20872474
– Forensic Linguistics List
– The pictures are from “TrademarkLinguistics.com”, as well as the video link.
He will be missed. From the team of this blog, we send a message of support to his family, friends and faithful followers.
Marta Gallardo Mora will be studying the case of Helena Jubany, a 7-year-old librarian who was found dead in Sabadell on 2 December 2001 after being thrown into an interior courtyard, naked and with several burns on her body; Helena had received mysterious “presents” which included hand-written notes. Marta will also address the “Prinzivalli case”, an airline employee, 39, who was arrested Feb. 16, 1984, while on duty at Pan Am’s cargo warehouse at Los Angeles International Airport, and charged by the Los Angeles County district attorney with making a series of false bomb threats to Pan Am flights. Both cases involve authorship attribution but the triggering “documents” are of a different nature: hand-written notes vs telephone calls.
