Remembering Andrew Radford

Andrew Radford passed away on December 16, 2024. 

I first met Andrew Radford in China. We were both invited speakers for the 5th International Conference on Formal Linguistics, held in Guangzhou, China (December 2011). When we met, we hit it off right away, and the four of us (me and my wife, Andrew and his), spent most of our time outside of the conference together. The conference organizers had assigned to us two young Chinese linguistics students as guides, one male one female. So that was our little group of six. We went to lunch and dinner together, and had fantastic feasts of Chinese food, in styles from all over the country. We asked our Chinese guides endless questions about China and Chinese food and the local region. We also did some sightseeing, going to various scenic regions and a zoo, where there were pandas. It was without a doubt one of the best conference travel experiences of my life, due in large part to meeting Andrew and his wife there (and of course, the hospitality of our Chinese hosts).

While at the conference, Andrew and I gabbed pretty much non-stop about syntax. This was when ‘Imposters’ was just about to come out, so that was on my mind. As for Andrew, he was working a lot on spoken corpus data that he had put together. He was finding all kinds of interesting syntactic patterns that he told me about. After intensive discussions for a few days, we decided to collaborate on a paper, which lay at the intersection of our research domains.

Collins, Chris and Andrew Radford. 2015. Gaps, Ghosts and Gapless Relatives in Spoken English. Studia Linguistica 69.2, 191-235.

From that time onward, I valued him greatly as a colleague. He was a real syntactician’s syntactician, brilliant and deeply committed to the scientific research agenda of generative syntax. After China, I wrote to him often about all kinds of issues. For example, he gave me extensive written feedback on various versions of my 2024 monograph (‘Principles of Argument Structure’), and helped me to clarify a thorny issue concerning exempt anaphora. 

I was so happy to meet Andrew in China, because I owed him a special debt. In the summer of 1984 (nearly thirty years before I met him in-person), I read through his Transformational Syntax (Cambridge University Press, 1981) in its entirety and worked through the exercises with a friend. I still remember how clearly the textbook was written and how captivating it was. It literally drew me in so that I became excited about generative syntax. Then the next academic year, I took a number of graduate level syntax courses (with Hale, Rizzi, Ross), with Andrew’s textbook as my background. It is quite possible that my career would have turned out differently if I had not found and studied his textbook.

I believe through his syntax textbooks he has probably done as much as any other individual to promote the scientific study of generative syntax in the world.