Influences and Inferences

I am deeply honored to receive the ACL’s Lifetime Achievement Award. I’m especially honored when I look back at the list of previous winners—Chuck Fillmore, Eugene Charniak, Eva Hajičová, Fred Jelinek, Martin Kay, Aravind Joshi, and the others— they’re all my heroes. I was of course delighted to learn of this award. The most we can hope for in life is to take part in the conversation, and an award like this means that you’ve taken part in the conversation. It seems to be a tradition to begin with a few formative anecdotes from childhood. For me, it all begins before I was born. My grandfather, a crusty old country lawyer in southern Indiana, told my father not to bother trying to go to law school. “You don’t know English grammar,” he said. “You’ll flunk out.” My dad accepted the challenge, bought a book entitled English Grammar, by Smith, Magee, and Seward (1928), and mastered it. He went on to become a very successful lawyer. Fast-forward to when I was in junior high school. My dad was distressed that my English classes looked to him more like social studies, and barely touched on grammar. So he persuaded me—actually, he probably bribed me, but I can’t remember what with—to master that same book, English Grammar by Smith, Magee, and Seward. This was a concession, because I was a math nerd, reading only textbooks on trigonometry and calculus, as my way of avoiding the humiliation of playing baseball. But I read the book, and I was amazed. English grammar was just like math! It had the same sorts of rules, the same kinds of abstractions, the same types of puzzles. It was actually fun! In my junior or senior year of high school we had to take something called the Kuder Preference Test, which would help us decide what career to choose. I scored high in math and in language. So my high school counselor told me I should write math books. In fact, she got it exactly backwards. It wasn’t that I should do language about math. It was that I should do math about language. I’ve met any number of computational linguists with a similar story. They grew up not knowing whether they wanted to be a physicist or a poet. They just knew both sounded fascinating. Then they discovered our field. My last near miss happened the week I was drafted into the Army. They gave us a battery of aptitude tests to see what specialties we’d be best for. One of the tests was to see if we should be sent to the Monterey Language School. Looking back on it, I realize now it was testing how well you could understand formal language theory. They’d give