Words for Ivan

First of all, I want to say how much I wish I were attending the Ivan Fest in person. Not only to show my great love and admiration for Ivan, but also because the program – like Ivan’s intellectual work – is a collection of inspiring and thought-provoking papers, all trying to answer big questions: what is language? How is it represented? How can we simultaneously accommodate its productive and restricted aspects? Like Ivan – the program manages to bring together researchers from different theoretical perspectives to engage in a lively and spirited debate. I wish I were there – to hear the papers; to learn and argue; to partake in the special environment that Ivan has always managed to create around him.

I first met Ivan when I started my PhD at Stanford in 2004. My favorite class that first semester was a seminar on island constraints taught by Ivan, and attended by a small group of graduate students, who were to become my friends and collaborators for years to come (Bruno, Neal, Florian, Philip). In that class, we read the syntactic and psycholinguistic literature on island constructions and developed a shared interest in seeing how much of the ungrammaticality of these constructions can be explained by processing factors. Without much experience, we embarked on a multi-year project asking how processing factors impact the perceived ungrammaticality of Superiority violations. It was my first empirical study of syntax; my first collaborative project; my first stab at connecting the often- disparate psycholinguistic and syntactic literatures. The work led to a conference presentation at John Hopkins later that year – and I fondly remember us meeting in Ivan’s hotel room after the talks were over, heatedly discussing what we learned while drinking Whiskey. I was so taken with the way Ivan treated us – the genuine respect for what we had to say, the genuine curiosity about what we had learned from the talks, the care he took to introduce us to everyone.

Since then, Ivan has played an important role in my growth as a linguist and scholar. His taste for big questions, his endless curiosity about language, his appetite for life and for solving linguistic mysteries, have all served as an example for how exciting and lively intellectual life can be. From the start, Ivan has not only been an exceptional mentor, but also a great friend. Our conversations easily move from the latest article, to politics, to what it means to be Jewish, to which Indian dish is the most delicious. I would turn to him with equal ease for solving a linguistic puzzle and tending to a broken heart. Now that I have students of my own – I know even better how admirable that is.

Dearest Ivan – I feel blessed and privileged to have been once your student, and now your collaborator and friend.

With much love

Inbal