Ivan A. Sag

Ivan Sag died on September 10, 2013, after a long illness. He is survived by his wife, Stanford sociolinguistics professor Penny Eckert. In a career spanning four decades, he published over 100 articles and 10 books, centered on the theme of developing precise, implementable, testable, psychologically plausible, and scalable models of natural language, especially syntax and semantics. Sag earned a B.A. from the University of Rochester (1971), an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (1973) and a Ph.D. from MIT (1976), all in Linguistics. He held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania (1976–1979) and Stanford University (1979–2013) where he was the Sadie Dunham Patek Professor in Humanities since 2008. In addition, he taught at ten LSA Linguistic Institutes (most recently as the Edward Sapir Professor at the Linguistic Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2011), at five ESSLLIs, as well as in summer schools or other visiting positions at NTNU (Trondheim), Université de Paris 7, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. At Stanford he was a founding member of and active participant in the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), which housed the HPSG and LinGO projects. He was also a key member of the group of faculty that developed and launched the Symbolic Systems program (in 1985) and was director of Symbolic Systems from 2000–2001 and 2005–2009. Among other honors, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2008. Sag’s advisor was Noam Chomsky; throughout his career, he saw himself as furthering what he understood to be the original Chomskyan enterprise. However, in the late 1970s, he broke with the Chomskyan mainstream because he felt it had abandoned central aspects of that original enterprise. Here’s how Sag told the story to Ta! magazine in 1993: