Monthly Archives: April 2013

Words from Inbal

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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

 

Sometimes it’s just hard to choose

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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

Cheers to Ivan!

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I read the HPSG book when I was 20. I was utterly enchanted by it. “Ivan Sag” was a big name in shining lights then, and Stanford was a supremely cool and magical faraway place.

Fast forward: Ivan Sag turns out to be an extremely nice guy with a Hammond organ and a bunch of band equipment LITERALLY in his GARAGE, and that’s where we meet for band practice. Ivan introduces me to Linda Ronstadt, and I kind of learn how to improvise and be in a rock and roll band.

Then Ivan Sag generously agrees to supervise my dissertation, and supports me happily and open-mindedly through my twists and bends as I finally start to find myself. Makes a profound and lasting difference on my life. Also teaches me to horizontally align asterisks properly and avoid having too much whitespace after periods in LaTeX.

And now I’m halfway across the world discovering new things and missing being able to bounce ideas off of Ivan. I really really wish I could have come to the IvanFest. (I had tickets booked but then was forced to cancel despite great sadness about it.) But I virtually raise my glass in honor of Ivan, hero of my linguistic youth, band-mate, advisor, friend, and inspiration!

Egészségedre!  (whole-ness-poss.2sg-to; `to your health’ backwards)

 

Liz

The HPSG Man

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Sung at the Dead Tongues gig at the IvanFest
to the tune of Hoochie Coochie Man
Geoff Nunberg

The gypsy woman told his mama
Before he was born,
You got a boy child’s comin’
He’s gonna be a son of a gun,
He gonna make them linguisticians
Jump and shout,
Then the world gonna know
Exactly what it’s all about.
Cause it’s him,
Everybody knows it’s him,
He’s the HPSG man
Everybody knows it’s him.

He’s got structures full of features,
He’s got bind and he’s got slash,
He’s got signs and he’s got synsems,
He’s gonna unify your ass,
He can process your construction
Any time he gets the urge,
But he don’t do derivation
And he don’t do move or merge,
But you know it’s him
Everybody knows it’s him,
He’s the HPSG man
Everybody knows it’s him.

On the seventh hour
Of the seventh day
Of the seventh month
The seven provosts say
We gotta get that boy some tenure
We gotta get that boy a chair
We gotta get that boy a glass of wine,
Lord, we got to keep him here
Cause it’s him
Everybody knows it’s him,
He’s the HPSG man,
Everybody knows it’s him.

Coda:
On the seventh hour
Of the seventh day
Of the seventh month
The seven provosts say,
He’s a thinker, he’s a lover,
And this you can tell,
He’s got seven hundred friends here
Who have come to wish him well.
Cause it’s him,
Everybody knows it’s him,
He’s the HPSG man,
Everybody knows it’s him.

 

 

You told me so

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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

With or Without (Udef)_Q

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[To the tune of U2’s “With or Without You”]

Leave the scope underspecified
Let the ARG resolve to i
I scope for you

Labeled rels and all of that
In a bag of preds are nice and flat
And I scope without you

With or without q
With or without q

Through hcons we lost qstore
Is one scope all? No I find more
And I’m scoping for you

With or without q
With or without q
I can’t scope
With or without q

It’s ambiguous that way
It’s ambiguous that way
Q-E-Q
Q-E-Q
It’s ambiguous that way

My x unbound
My labels loose; you’ve got me with
No way to scope and
Nothing left to prove

It’s ambiguous that way
It’s ambiguous that way
Q-E-Q
Q-E-Q
It’s ambiguous that way

With or without q
With or without q
I can’t scope
With or without q

With or without q
With or without q
I can’t scope
With or without q
With or without q

Slowly, I’m beginning to understand

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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

Shalom Lappin

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Dear Ivan,

I am so sorry that I cannot attend the wonderful workshop organized in your honour next week. I am stuck here in London due to a variety of teaching and administrative commitments.

You have had a profound impact on my thinking about syntax and semantics over the years, as should be clear from some of the things that I have published. You strongly influenced the way in which I have come to study the interaction of grammar and cognition, and I am grateful to you for the insights that you have shared with me.

It is also largely your fault that I took up guitar, got into music, and started a band. I had secretely wanted to do this for years, but seeing you play at several LSA Summer Institutes, and jamming with you and John Beavers on a visit to Stanford years ago convinced me that linguists can be rock stars (or, in my case, incompetent but joyously committed blues players).

But it is your profound generosity of spirit and your wonderful friendship that shine brightest for me. They have enriched my life, and they will continue to do so in the future.

With deep affection,
Shalom

Gefeliciteerd Ivan!

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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

Namaste Ivan-ji

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Ivan (Ivanji)

I was planning to come to see you at the time of the special seminar in your honor. However, due to some family commitments, I will not be able to come. I will make up for it at some time and come and visit you.

I have very fond memories of your being here at Penn, the various discussion we had (and the real linguistics I learned from you), the enormous time you spent with many of my CIS students, straightening them out with respect to their linguistic knowledge, taking time to see what I was doing, and of course, livening up many of the parties at our home in West Philadelphia (including the musical entertainment by you and Jerry Kaplan). Those were truly wonderful  days.

I have benefited immensely from your asking me from time to time about how certain constructions are handled in the TAG framework. These questions have helped me and my students very much.

I am very sorry to have to miss the wonderful seminar in your honor and the wonderful parties that will, no doubt, happen.

Susan and I send you our very best wishes. I was going to write this message in Hindi, as I always did. However, since this message will go on the special webpage, I thought that will not make it easy for others to read it, even though the expected readers are all top linguists.

aapka bahot puraanaa dost,

Aravind