Dear Ivan,

You told me so.

One day, as a 1st or 2nd year student, I remember complaining to you about my Semantics I class and wondering aloud if I could get out of taking Semantics II. You said that that was absolutely a bad idea. Even if what I wanted to do was syntax, I still had to be conversant in semantics, so that when I saw a problem “coming down the pike” I could tell whether it was a syntactic problem or a semantic problem. I had a vivid image of linguistic problems making their way towards me on some sort of aqueduct—an intimidating thought! I took your advice then, and now I realize that almost every problem I work on is also a semantic problem, at least in the sense that in order to add an analysis to an implemented grammar I have to first pin down the desired semantic representation.

A couple of years later, you suggested to me by way of advice that I should really consider going into computational linguistics. You said that the job market was better in that field and that you thought I was well-suited for it. At the time I took computational linguistics to be solely concerned with dry (to me) research such as parsing algorithms and said, “That’s not for me!” After several years of trying to get a tenure track position in either syntax or sociolinguistics, I found a job in industry doing grammar engineering, on the strength of the work I had done for you as an RA on the LinGO project, and from there a faculty position in computational linguistics.

I’m sure there are other cases too, but these two stand out to me: Ivan, not only can you say “I told you so,” but I’m glad of it!

Emily