View source for Ivan Sag

{{Short description|Linguist and cognitive scientist}}
{{Infobox academic|birth_date={{Birth date|1949|11|09}}|death_date={{Death date and age|2013|09|10|1949|11|09}}|birth_place=[[Alliance, Ohio]], US|alma_mater={{Plainlist|
* [[University of Rochester]] {{Small|([[Bachelor of Arts|BA]])}}
* [[University of Pennsylvania]] {{Small|([[Master of Arts|MA]])}}
* [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] {{Small|([[Doctor of Philosophy|PhD]])}}
}}|thesis_title=Deletion and logical form|thesis_url=http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16401|thesis_year=1976|doctoral_advisor=[[Noam Chomsky]]|spouse=[[Penny Eckert]]|discipline=Linguist|workplaces=[[Stanford University]]|death_place=[[Menlo Park, California]], US}}

'''Ivan Andrew Sag''' (November 9, 1949 – September 10, 2013) was an American [[linguistics|linguist]] and [[cognitive science|cognitive scientist]]. He did research in areas of syntax and semantics as well as work in computational linguistics.

==Personal life==
Born in [[Alliance, Ohio]] on November 9, 1949,<ref>{{cite web | title = Ivan A. Sag | publisher = [[Stanford University]] | url = http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/bio.html | access-date = 2013-08-15 | archive-date = 2018-08-23 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20180823140754/http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/bio.html | url-status = dead }}</ref><ref>{{cite web  | title = RIP Ivan Sag (1949-2013)  | publisher = Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program  | url = http://symsys.stanford.edu/viewing/htmldocument/22985  | access-date = 2013-09-11  | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130921164828/http://symsys.stanford.edu/viewing/htmldocument/22985  | archive-date = 2013-09-21  | url-status = dead  }}</ref> Sag attended the [[Mercersburg Academy]] but was expelled shortly before graduation.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/mburg-speech.pdf|title=The Element of Surprise|last=Sag|first=Ivan|date=2008-03-28|website=Stanford Linguistics|access-date=2019-06-02|archive-date=2016-08-07|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160807000307/http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/mburg-speech.pdf|url-status=dead}}</ref> He received a [[Bachelor of Arts|BA]] from the [[University of Rochester]], an [[Master of Arts|MA]] from the [[University of Pennsylvania]]—where he studied comparative [[Indo-European languages]], [[Sanskrit]], and [[sociolinguistics]]—and a [[Doctor of Philosophy|PhD]] from [[MIT]] in 1976, writing his dissertation (advised by [[Noam Chomsky]]) on ellipsis.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/september/ivan-sag-obituary-092713.html|title=Stanford linguistics professor and cognitive scientist Ivan Sag dies at 63|last=Goldman|first=Corrie|date=2013-09-27|website=Stanford University|language=en|access-date=2019-06-03}}</ref>

Sag received a Mellon Fellowship at Stanford University in 1978–79, and remained in California from that point on. He was appointed a position in Linguistics at Stanford, and earned tenure there. He died of cancer in 2013. He was married to sociolinguist [[Penelope Eckert]].<ref>Obituary: Ivan Andrew Sag. ''LinguistList.'' Mon. Oct 14 2013. [https://web.archive.org/web/20131018063040/http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-4027.html]</ref>

==Academic work==
Sag made notable contributions to the fields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language processing. His early work was as a member of the research teams that invented and developed [[head-driven phrase structure grammar]] (HPSG) as well as [[generalized phrase structure grammar]], HPSG's immediate intellectual predecessor. Later, he worked on Sign-Based Construction Grammar, which blended HPSG with ideas from [[Construction grammar|Berkeley Construction Grammar]]. 

He was the author or co-author of 10 books and over 100 articles. In general, his research late in life primarily concerned [[Constraint-based grammar|constraint-based]], [[Lexicalist hypothesis|lexicalist]] models of grammar, and their relation to theories of language processing.

Sag was the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Professor of [[Linguistics]], and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_people?group=Administration |title=Symbolic Systems Program<!-- Bot generated title --> |access-date=2008-05-15 |archive-date=2008-06-07 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080607204625/http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_people?group=Administration |url-status=dead }}</ref> at [[Stanford University]]. A fellow of the [[American Academy of Arts and Sciences]] and the [[Linguistic Society of America]], in 2005 he received the LSA's Fromkin Prize for distinguished contributions to the field of linguistics.<ref>{{cite web | title = LSA Honors and Awards | publisher = Linguistic Society of America | url = http://www.linguisticsociety.org/about/who-we-are/lsa-awards | accessdate = 11 September 2013}}</ref>

He was honored by a volume of studies published in 2013 in his honor, ''The Core and the Periphery: Data-Driven Perspectives on Syntax Inspired by Ivan A. Sag'', edited by Philip Hofmeister and Elisabeth Norcliffe.

==Selected publications==

*Sag, Ivan A. 1980.  ''Deletion and Logical Form.'' New York:Garland Press.
*Gazdar, Gerald, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Ivan A. Sag. 1985. ''Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar.'' Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Oxford: Basil Blackwell's.
*Sag, Ivan A., Gerald Gazdar, Thomas Wasow and Steven Weisler. 1985. "Coordination and How to Distinguish Categories." ''Natural Language and Linguistic Theory'' 3:117–171
*Pollard, Carl, and Ivan A. Sag. 1987. ''Information-Based Syntax and Semantics; Volume One - Fundamentals.'' CSLI Lecture Notes Series No. 13. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Distributed by University of Chicago Press.
*Nunberg, Geoffrey, Ivan A. Sag, and Thomas Wasow. 1994. "Idioms." ''Language'' 70:491– 538.
*Pollard, Carl, and Ivan A. Sag. 1992. "Anaphors in English and the Scope of Binding Theory." ''Linguistic Inquiry'' 23.2:261–303.
*Pollard, Carl, and Ivan A. Sag. 1994. ''Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Stanford: CSLI Publications.
*Miller, Philip, and Ivan A. Sag. 1997. "French Clitic Movement Without Clitics or Movement." ''Natural Language and Linguistic Theory'' 15:573–639.
*Sag, Ivan A. 1997. "English Relative Clause Constructions." ''Journal of Linguistics'' 33.2:431–484.
*Jonathan Ginzburg and Ivan A. Sag. 2000. ''Interrogative Investigations: the form, meaning, and use of English Interrogatives.'' Stanford: CSLI Publications.
*Bouma, Gosse, Robert Malouf, and Ivan A. Sag. 2001. "Satisfying Constraints on Extraction and Adjunction." ''Natural Language and Linguistic Theory'' 19.1:1–65.
*Kim, Jong-Bok, and Ivan A. Sag. 2002. "French and English Negation without Head-Movement." ''Natural Language and Linguistic Theory'' 20.2:339-412.
*Sag, Ivan A., Thomas Wasow, and Emily Bender. 2003. ''Syntactic Theory: A formal introduction.'' Second edition. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

==References==

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[[Category:1949 births]]
[[Category:2013 deaths]]
[[Category:Syntacticians]]
[[Category:University of Rochester alumni]]
[[Category:People from Alliance, Ohio]]
[[Category:Linguists of Indo-European languages]]
[[Category:Stanford University Department of Linguistics faculty]]
[[Category:Deaths from cancer in California]]
[[Category:Linguists from the United States]]
[[Category:Writers from Ohio]]
[[Category:Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society]]
[[Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences]]
[[Category:Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America]]