My maternal cousin, Ivan Andrew Sag, passed away on Tuesday, September 10, 2013 (1949-2013)
ivan A. Sag (PhD, MIT 1976) was the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities and Professor of Linguistics and Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. He was also a Senior Researcher at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Linguistic Society of America.
Ivan was one of the originators/developers of Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG). He worked on numerous syntactic problems and also made contributions in semantics, experimental and computational linguistics, phonology, and the study of discourse. Focusing on issues at the morphology/syntax and syntax/semantics interfaces, his recent research primarily concerned constraint-based, lexicalist models of grammar, specifically construction grammars, and their relation to theories of language processing.
Born [11/9/49] and raised in Alliance, Ohio, Ivan attended The Mercersburg Academy in Mercersburg, PA before he was unceremoniously expelled (story here). He began his linguistic career studying Indo-European and Sanskrit at the University of Rochester (BA – 1971) and the University of Pennsylvania (MA – 1973). His interest in grammatical theory led him to study at MIT; his 1976 PhD dissertation (advised by Noam Chomsky) was on ellipsis. Ivan was Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1976 – 1979) before joining the faculty at Stanford in 1979, broadening his interests to include model-theoretic semantics, discourse, and language processing.
Ivan received many honors and fellowships; he was especially proud of the Linguistic Society of America’s Victoria Fromkin Prize in 2005, for distinguished contributions to the field of linguistics, and of the Edward Sapir Professorship at the LSA’s Linguistic Institute at UC Boulder in 2011.
Ivan was the founder of Dead Tongues, the unofficial rock and roll band of the Stanford Linguistics Department (which played at the April IvanFest).
Ivan is survived by his wife, our linguistics colleague Penny Eckert.
AND ME, FIRST COUSIN. I WILL MISS YOU IN THIS LIFE.
Like his first cousin, I am extremely saddened to learn (belatedly) of Ivan’s death. I knew him well in his two years at Penn when we were both grad students in the Linguistics Department, took some of the same classes, and studied together for the MA exam. I had further contact with him during a semester as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford in spring of 2001.
Ivan was one of those rare human beings who dramatically affect those around him from the very first encounter, who contribute far more than they take from their contexts, helping to make life far more interesting than it otherwise might be. Besides possessing a monumental intellect and creativity, he was a people-person who thrived intellectually as well as personally in the company of others. Some of the best discussions I had in my life were with Ivan, especially about Zellig Harris’ linguistics and Noam Chomsky’s early works. We also had a lot of fun at parties and gigs where he played and sang. His combination of knowledge and personality made him truly a Force of Nature, a real Giant of a Man.
I came across this website in searching for Ivan’s work on idioms and collocations in relation to code-mixed expressions I have been studying for almost 25 years in Hong Kong. This led me to the project on Multi-Word Expressions, an important part of Ivan’s legacy to linguistics that can be related to the development of new language in code-mixing, thus extending his work into a new area of language study.