Monthly Archives: February 2013

Generosity

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Congratulations Ivan for 40 years of sterling research in Linguistics
and a lifetime of being a top man. You approach both work and play
with much the same attitude: you identify what needs to be done to
improve things for everyone, and you do it. I find it hard to think
of anyone with more generosity of spirit.

In work, this approach means that you have tackled really hard problems at the
interface between prosody, syntax, semantics and pragmatics that most
researchers work hard to avoid! Your research on intonation and
on multi-word expressions are just two examples of this.  In general, you blaze a path that others can then follow, providing general and flexible formal frameworks for you and others to do their modelling in.  HPSG and MRS have provided a scaffold that many have used to structure and clarify their thoughts on a massive range of linguistic data, in many languages and at many levels of analysis.

In play, what you often identify as the action to make
everyone’s lives better is hosting a BBQ! How I LOVE your BBQs!

Ivan at the BBQ

Max and I will always be grateful to you and Penny for giving a BBQ to all our Californian wedding guests, so that they could meet each other before taking the journey to Scotland for the wedding itself. And you offered this even though you couldn’t attend the wedding yourself. As always, it was a great party.

Not much gets in your way when you endeavour to make everyone a little happier.  Everyone benefits from a great party with a band providing live music. The fact that potential band members for a party at the Linguistics Institute were
scattered across the planet didn’t stop you. You invented Rehearsal by Email:

Ivan: Shall we do Knock on Wood?
Jo: Yeah, I can sing that.
Steve: Do we have enough horns?
Alex: Sure, so long as that guy with the trombone turns up.
Ivan: How about doing it in A minor?
Everyone: Sounds good.
Ivan: Right.  That’s one song sorted.  What else shall we do?  How about Proud Mary?

Miraculously, it worked, largely because you’re a natural leader who
brought us all into line. And what enormous fun the whole experience
was!

Love Alex Lascarides

Parabéns!

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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… 😉

Cheers, Ivan

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Hi Ivan

Thank you, for giving me one of your famous ‘alternate calls’ back then in 2001. I only had applied to Stanford, so it wasn’t exactly the best news to be the 6th of 5, but you artfully made me not feel rejected. Luckily, some dude decided that he was better off converting heathens in Abagabbagubbu land and I was able to go to Stanford (which, after somebody finally stole my “Fuck Stanford” T-shirt from my laundry, ended up being really nice). I also remember the interview itself– you, of course, had your feet on the table, probably fanning yourself and being amused by something.

Thank you also for your wonderful introduction to my thesis proposal defense, which I –surprise- scheduled a little late (Your advised the younger students not to take me as an example: “usually one first writes a proposal, then a thesis, and then applies for jobs. Not the other way around”).

And between these two things (the call and the introduction), there was that ‘little thing’ called a Ph.D., which for me included countless moments of classic Ivan teaching (engaged, always curious, always ready to argue, passionate); you ‘briefly’ explaining the history of syntactic theory in what ends up being a cluster fuck of sorts on the blackboard; your advice on linguistics, academia and life; you telling me why I was wrong about X (of course, I wasn’t; you were); me having to rewrite my term paper on Bulgarian direct object clitics for what felt like the 50th time (to pass the Ivan threshold; I now do that to my students, too, kinda as an homage to you ;)); and, and awesome summer without air conditioning at the LSA Institute in Boston (thanks to you organizing a house for all of us students and your buddies) – thanks to you, we had the best party (well, and the better theories, of course). But seriously, I truly appreciate all the energy and that you made it easy but interesting. And the potato.

Florian (Jaeger)