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