Ivan Andrew Sag was born on November 9, 1949, and passed away on September 10, 2013. He was an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He studied areas such as syntax and semantics, and he worked in the field of computational linguistics.

Personal life

Sag was born on November 9, 1949, in Alliance, Ohio. He attended Mercersburg Academy but was removed from school shortly before graduating. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania—where he studied comparative Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, and sociolinguistics—and a doctorate from MIT in 1976. His dissertation, which focused on ellipsis, was completed under the guidance of Noam Chomsky.

In 1978–79, Sag received a Mellon Fellowship at Stanford University and stayed in California afterward. He was given a position in Linguistics at Stanford and earned tenure there. Sag passed away from cancer in 2013. He was married to sociolinguist Penelope Eckert.

Academic work

Ivan A. Sag made important contributions to the study of language, including how sentences are structured (syntax), the meaning of words (semantics), how language is used in context (pragmatics), and how language is processed by the brain. Early in his career, he worked with research teams that created two grammar theories: head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) and generalized phrase structure grammar, which was the earlier version of HPSG. Later, he helped develop Sign-Based Construction Grammar, which combined ideas from HPSG with those from another grammar theory called Berkeley Construction Grammar.

He wrote or co-wrote 10 books and more than 100 articles. In his later years, his research focused on grammar models that use rules and word-based structures, and how these models relate to how people process language.

At Stanford University, Sag held the title of Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, was a professor of Linguistics, and led the Symbolic Systems Program. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Linguistic Society of America. In 2005, he received the LSA's Fromkin Prize for outstanding contributions to the study of language.

In 2013, a book titled The Core and the Periphery: Data-Driven Perspectives on Syntax Inspired by Ivan A. Sag, edited by Philip Hofmeister and Elisabeth Norcliffe, was published in his honor.

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. Published 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.
• Ginzburg, Jonathan, 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.