The album cover

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.

John Gumperz

In the NYT yesterday, an obit for John Gumperz, long of Berkeley and more recently of UC Santa Barbara as well: “John J. Gumperz, Linguist of Cultural Interchange, dies at 91″. As Ben Zimmer posted in Language Log:

John J. Gumperz, the Berkeley sociolinguist who, among his many contributions, introduced “the speech community” as a unit of linguistic analysis, died on Friday at the age of 91. Margalit Fox has a thoughtful obituary in the New York Times.

Ben goes on to extract material from Fox’s obit, which frames the story by means of an anecdote that begins:

The conflict hinged on a single word: “gravy.”

In additional to his many scholarly achievements, John was known for his helpfulness to students and colleagues alike. A few days ago, Jef Verschueren, writing to the International Pragmatics Association, spoke of his “modest, inspiring, and warm presence”. A deeply nice person as well as a smart one, a pleasure to be around.

I first met John so very long ago that I can’t recall the circumstances — except that it was in the early ’60s, when I was still in grad school.

 

Wuggiana

On Thomas Thurman’s Facebook page, passed on by Bert Vaux this morning, a linguistics cartoon:

The cartoon alludes to the Wug Test in psycholinguistics.