Ilse Lehiste (1922-2010), late Ohio State professor emeritus of linguistics, was an influential figure in the field of linguistics and phonetics. In her distinguished career, Lehiste authored, co-authored and edited over 20 books, 200 articles and 100 reviews. Additionally, Lehiste was the Linguistics Department’s first chair when it was founded in 1967.
According to Mary Beckman, professor emeritus of linguistics at Ohio State, Lehiste was one of a small handful of people in North America who were doing important foundational work on prosody (the patterns of stress and intonation in a language) at a time when most phonologists and many phoneticians were narrowly focused on uncovering consonants and vowel features. She stood out in this early area of research for her solid methodological contributions and thorough scholarship across multiple disciplines, for her early attention to prosody above the word and to the syntax-phonology interface, and for her critically important work on non-Germanic (and even non-IE) languages. More recently, she continued to shape the field in her work on rhythm in poetry and music and its relationship to rhythm in prose, and in her generous mentoring of younger researchers with whom she collaborated.
Lehiste received both the Distinguished University Professor and the Distinguished Scholar Award during her career at Ohio State. She was also a fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Acoustical Society of America, and the International Society of Phonetic Sciences. The government of the Republic of Estonia presented her the Weidemann award given by for “outstanding contributions to research on Estonian language, for developing Estonian linguistics, for providing successful scholarly leadership, for bringing international attention to the Estonian language, and for literary activity in the Estonian language”.