Well, I’m on a plane flying back to Austin after attending the first two days of IvanFest — I missed the third day only because I have to rush back to UT on three hours of sleep to roll straight off the plane and into the classroom in time to teach a group of weary undergraduates the basics of compositional semantics. I do not see this going well. But instead of prepping my notes I’m still reminiscing, thinking back on my 13 years and counting of knowing Ivan Sag and trying to hone in on my favorite Ivan story to share in honor of his 40 years in the field.
Is it the time Ivan called me in April 2000 to lay on the heavy recruitment to come to Stanford for my PhD? I think the key moment in that conversation came when we realized how much we had in common musically — Ivan’s pitch changed instantly from telling me I’d be crazy to do computational linguistics anywhere else to simply, “Come to Stanford — we’ll jam”. That part came true — very true — though I also switched to syntax and never looked back. For what it’s worth, though, I didn’t need the recruitment. I knew I wanted to go to Stanford to study with Ivan ever since I first cracked open Sag and Wasow (1999) as an undergraduate and realized that that was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Or maybe flash forward several years later, after Ivan and I had been running in circles — and into ditches — for months trying to come up with analysis of non-constituent coordination in HPSG without CCG-type functional composition. At the end of yet another frustrating, empty-handed meeting, Ivan suddenly bolted upright in his chair and said, “Wait, wait, I’ve got it!” You could almost literally see the light bulb above his head and the fire in his eyes, and the ideas started to pour out fast and furious, so much so that I couldn’t keep up. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “Let me take a whack at the abstract.” Hours later we had it, and the paper — now a more general treatise on coordination with non-constituent coordination as a special case —- practically wrote itself.
Or is it about sitting together in Ivan’s living room late at night watching old bootleg videos of Howlin’ Wolf backstage at some gig slagging off Sonny Boy Williamson to his face, calling him a sad old drunk who don’t love nothing but the whisky, before launching into a fiery rendition of Spoonful? Or about one of our now countless Dead Tongues gigs, including the epic barnstormer we just had literally two days ago? Or the time Ivan called me at 11:00pm on a Tuesday to tell me all about the new Telecaster he’d just bought? Or the time we stole that shopping cart from the Whole Foods in Cambridge, MA, a little act of civil disobedience to protest their stupid grocery loading elevator system? (NB: If you’re a cop and you’re reading this, the statute of limitations has way passed on this one. I checked.)
No, I think my favorite story is simply about a regular working day in Margaret Jacks Hall sometime in Winter 2005, I think on a Wednesday, around 9:00pm or so. I was in my office downstairs and Ivan in his upstairs, both of us staying late to frantically get our respective abstracts for HPSG 2005 together (not that it mattered — we’d both missed the deadline by a day). Ivan had been feeling a little unsure of his paper and I a little unsure of mine, so we did an abstract swap to get each others’ feedback. Some comments got emailed in both directions, and eventually he came down to my office that night to hash through both sets of the ideas orally — this makes sense but I don’t buy this, can you clarify that, you can’t say that without better empirical evidence, you need to streamline the argument here and here, and yes, I see your point, but WHY would this be the case? Another round of revisions, another quick mutual sanity check, and we were done.
Times like that — and there were many — taught me more than any textbook or organized course. Although Ivan was still the professor and I the student, it all melted away, and we were just two working syntacticians sharing ideas, listening to each other, and pushing each other towards better insights, sharper precision, and greater clarity of thought. I learned a lot from Ivan about what it means to be a practicing academic, what it means to be a colleague and to have colleagues, and just how rewarding and fulfilling this crazy life we’ve all chosen for ourselves can be, especially when it means working in a community with people as brilliant and caring as Ivan A. Sag.
Congratulations on 40 years of fighting the good fight, and thanks, Ivan, for all the wonderful memories, and for more to come!
John