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