Today is the third and last day of the IvanFest at Stanford (Structure and Evidence in Linguistics, a conference honoring Ivan Sag). A slideshow of Ivan photos goes by before the sessions begin and in breaks. My favorite:
This shows Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag, in alphabetical order from left to right, in (I think) 1984, while they were finishing the manuscript of:
Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum & Ivan Sag, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Basil Blackwell, 1985.
— looking for all the world (except for that computer) like a reasonably well-behaved rock group on an album cover.
And then CSLI Publications at Stanford broke out the new book:
Philip Hofmeister & Elisabeth Norcliffe (eds.), The Core and the Periphery: Data-Drive Perspectives on Syntax Inspired by Ivan A. Sag.
with an introductory essay by Hofmeister & Norcliffe and contributions by Jason Merchant, Philip Miller & Geoffrey K. Pullum, Annie Zaenen & Lauri Karttunen, Dan Flickinger & Thomas Wasow, Elizabeth Coppock, Stephen Wechsler, Dan Flickinger, Emily M. Bender & Alex Lascarides, Jonathan Ginzburg, Anne Abeillé & Danièle Godard & Jean-Marie Marandin, Paul Kay, Rui P. Chaves, Laura Staum Casasanto, Philip Hofmeister & Elisabeth Norcliffe, Philip Hofmeister, and Joanna Nykiel.
April 30, 2013 at 12:50 pm |
Is that an Atari? And what’s Gerald got on his shirt?
April 30, 2013 at 5:09 pm |
I think it’s an IBM PC. But I don’t know what Gerald has on his shirt.
December 26, 2014 at 6:14 am
It’s the remains of the price sticker scraped off the album cover.
May 1, 2013 at 6:03 am |
On viewing this photo yesterday, Geoff said, “I can’t believe we were ever that young” — my reaction as well.
October 20, 2021 at 7:29 pm |
That’s exactly how I remember my undergrad adviser (Ivan).
March 12, 2026 at 10:45 pm |
Are there any pictures of the ‘Penis Car’?
March 13, 2026 at 7:24 am |
I was baffled by this query, so wrote MT to ask what it’s about (before approving it as a comment; I get a lot of comments spam). And got this informative response by return mail from Germany:
Ah. I was there at the time, working on a separate project with Geoff Pullum at CSLI, but somehow the penis car was insufficiently memorable for me.