To the author of “Read at your own risk: Syntactic and semantic horrors you can find in your medicine chest” (1974), a speech act for 8/22. Jerry, if you’re now 83, that means that in two weeks I’ll be 85, and how did this happen to us, but, hey, we’re still standing. I am happy you keep having birthdays.
To other readers: Jerry is Jerrold M. Sadock, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics and the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. A friend for 60 years now and one of three sustained collaborators of mine. Also a really good guy.
As for 60 years ago, Wikipedia tells us that
He received his B.A. in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965, and an M.A. in linguistics in 1967 and a PhD in linguistics in 1969 from the same institution.
Then from my 12/4/11 posting “Collaborations”:
Reading Daniel Kahneman‘s Thinking, Fast and Slow …, I was especially taken by Kahneman’s glimpses of his longtime collaboration with Amos Tversky.
… Kahneman’s depiction of his collaboration with Tversky resonated with me. I’ve collaborated with many people in my academic career (going back to 1963), but three collaborative conversations of some years’ duration (each covering a range of topics) have been especially significant for me: with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, with Jerry Sadock, and with Geoff Pullum.
… With Jerry, starting in the early 1970s, on ambiguity, sentence types, and mathematical linguistics, with publications from 1975 through 1987.
As for Jerry’s publications, a list of them through 2009 can be found in the preface to the Festschrift in his honor:
Etsuyo Yuasa, Tista Bagchi, & Katherine Beals (eds.), Pragmatics and Autolexical Grammar: In Honor of Jerry Sadock (Benjamins, 2011)
Then, to my sorrow, the celebrations for Jerry came at a time in my life when I was going through a series of crises and so not able to take part. At least I can whoop and holler a bit today.
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