Thanks Ivan for having introduced me to HPSG at the ’91 ESSLLI summer school and for being an inspiring thesis supervisor. I have always enjoyed our discussions about linguistics and life….
Category Archives: Greeting
Congrats and Thank you!
Congratulations to the 40th anniversary of Ivan’s spectacular professional life! Congratulations also to the colleagues that organized the wonderful tribute event!
My connection to NLP and Computational Lingusitics started with the project BulTreeBank, where my and my colleagues’ linguistic Bible became HPSG’94 book of Pollard and Sag. (By the way, it still is.)
I would like to thank Ivan for being one of the most prominent driving forces in Linguistics.
I would like to thank him and Dan Flickinger for supporting my 5-month Fulbright stay at Stanford University.
Hm, one idea that I am wondering about is whether Ivan would like to start writing also political books in addition to the linguistic ones (similarly to another prominent guy in Linguistics).
Greeting
I can’t remember more sustained linguistic fun than reading drafts of the HPSG book over a couple of years. Thank you for letting me be part of that!
Therearen’tenoughwords
I am sad I didn’t know about this Fest until today… there are no words, really, to express my admiration for Ivan, person and linguist. I just wish I could have spent more time with him when I was at Stanford, or more time since I left. There is still time, and I still feel incredibly fortunate to have met him (and played with him!).
Bruno Estigarribia
Relative linguistic and social acculturation
One of the practical things I learned from Ivan during an ESSLI conference in Prague in 1996 was a simple but accurate measure of relative linguistic and social acculturation. According to the Sag Diagnostic, a traveller’s degree of acculturation is inversely proportional to the rate at which they accumulate coins (particularly those high in mass and low in value).
Jim Blevins
You told me so
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
Slowly, I’m beginning to understand
Dear Ivan,
We go back a long way, you and I. We graduated about the same time
and for a while we were competing for the same jobs, never to my
advantage I seem to remember. There are many memories I have
stretching over the period from the mid-seventies to the present.
A couple of them involve your garage. One of them we have talked
about before and you, graciously, claim to have forgotten it. There
was a time when you had a keyboard in your garage and you needed a
keyboard player (for Dead Tongues, I guess). “You just have to play
the chords,” you said when I protested that this kind of music was
beyond me, and you presented me with a written chord-sequence. But when I
played the chords it sounded (sort of) like Mozart complete with
Alberti base. “You have to get the rhythm too,” you said. I tried
again, and again, and the more I tried the more like Mozart it
sounded. In the end we both agreed that I could not play this kind of
music. Later we were discussing this with dinner guests and you said
with genuine respect, “Robin is a classically trained pianist”, as if
that would explain my failure. You’re a kind man, Ivan.
The other garage memory comes from the period when Elisabet and I used
to spend time periodically in Stanford and needed somewhere to store
domestic bits and pieces between visits. A corner of your garage was
offered for the purpose. “I call it my Cooper Store,” you said. Not
only kind, but funny.
Then, of course, there was the long lasting bottle of Pimm’s which you
would bring out if (and, for all I know, only if) I visited. It’s
long gone now and neither of us can drink it any more, but the memory
is still sweet.
Another memory is from a discussion we had at, I think, an LSA summer
school. You were presenting some complex analysis (I forget of what),
too fast for me to follow. “Let’s take it one step at a time,” I
said. “I love this,” you said, rejoicing at my slowness. “No really,
it’s great to get down to the details.” Generous, you are too.
Intellectually, we have in common the heady days of the eighties and
the somewhat befuddled perception that HPSG and situation semantics
(among a number of other things) were both following a
“constraint-based” or “Bay Area” approach. I’ve been thinking a bit
over recent years what we meant by that. And the more I think, the
more I come to understand the depth and importance of your work on
grammar and how much it is influencing my own current work on type
theory and records. It opens up an approach to grammar that is so
much more related to what people actually seem to do when they talk to
each other than many other approaches to grammar. Thanks, Ivan. I
really feel like I’m beginning to understand.
Now if I could just get the swing of those chords, I’d be all set.
Robin
Gefeliciteerd Ivan!
Gefeliciteerd Ivan!
This is to thank you for our cooperation over the years.
After first meeting you during the 1987 Stanford Linguistic Institute, you were
kind enough to be on my thesis committee, even though that was about something as
obscure as Categorial Unification Grammar.
We really got involved in a joint project when I mailed you that I had seen you
on Dutch TV! (You were interviewed during an ESSLLI in Prague (?) in a news item
dedicated to Johan van Benthem, who had just won a prestigious Dutch science
prize). As a kind of side note, I made some remark about an alternative
formulation for the lexical rules for (adjunct) extraction.
That really struck a chord. Our cooperation (which soon also included Rob
Malouf) proceeded mostly by email, but a lot of the work also got done during an
intense but entertaining week at Stanford. This is not to say everything went
smoothly. Our first attempt to publish about our ideas (an abstract submitted to
the HPSG conference) met with utter skepticism on the side of the reviewers.
What irritated them most was not so much the fact that the abstract contained a
combination of wacky ideas and obscure notation, but that it was presented with
an air as if the authors were the inventors of HPSG itself. So much for blind reviewing 😉
For a long time, you were a regular visitor. I remember dining at Frans Zwarts’
place, with John Nerbonne, Jack Hoeksema, and others, where you were the cook
and you would tell us how wonderful it was that one could actually buy all the
ingredients for a genuine Indian dish right here in Groningen.
John Nerbonne was so kind to put together a collection of pictures from people in Groningen who want to say hello,
Gosse Bouma
Begona Villada, Petra Hendriks and Laurie Stowe, Leonie Bosveld and Gertjan van Noord, Sharon Zwarts and Ellen Nerbonne, Gosse Bouma and Martin Kay, Ivan at Begona’s defense, Dicky Gilbers and Jack Hoeksema, Laurie and Jan-Wouter Zwart, Frans Zwarts, Leonoor van der Beek, Stephen Clark and Johan Bos, Frans, Sharon, Ellen, and John Nerbonne
Ivan the Great
Your awe-inspiring work
found me intimidated
As did the clever theories
you had created
But gregarious and relaxed as you are
It was a feeling one could only maintain from afar
Wearing open toed sandals and shorts from Bermuda
You could always be found
In your office at Cordura
Ever at home
in a unification matrix
Always on the lookout for that well motivated fix
(that also predicts)
you always convey insight and rigor in the right mix.
We’ve shared many a birthday,
the occasional frat house,
a love for Grammar from the Bay Area
And a cherished good grouse.
You’re a great man, Ivan,
A maven, a shaman, and a heaven-sent spokesman
I’m no poet and now we all know it, but
To one who holds you most dear,
a soppy poem seemed somehow appropriate.
Parabéns!
Congratulations Ivan, for forty years of outstanding contributions to the field. May many more years of contributions ensue, in good health and great company. But let me make this a bit more precise:
Thank you also for your generosity and you friendship (these have utterly transformed my life, have no doubt about it). Don’t forget: you are invited to visit us at Buffalo any time you want, and to crash the new crib… 😉