Remembering Haj Ross

When I was an undergraduate at MIT (1982-1985), I took Ken Hale’s graduate introduction to syntax. I remember a large guy in the back of the room asking difficult questions throughout the semester. I thought to myself, “How could I think of such questions to ask?” He turned out to be Haj Ross, another professor at MIT. He was taking Ken’s course to catch up on the so-called Government and Binding (GB) framework. 

After that, while still an undergraduate, I signed up for Haj’s seminar on Islands. There were very few people in the class (only 2 or 3 as I recall). He could go on about any syntax topic, bringing up endless interesting examples and counter-examples from English and other languages. He was one of my earliest models for what a syntactician is supposed to be like.

One day, as we were heading to the soda machine during break, he called the cans of soda “industrial sludge” and he told me an anecdote about the Navajo: when they make rugs, they intentionally leave a small error in the rug. I may be mistaken, but I think he wanted to tell me that no work is perfect, and that the imperfections are part of the beauty of the work. That little piece of wisdom has helped me finish writing many papers.

Later in my student days, I heard one professor refer to Haj (somewhat derisively) as ‘a walking counter-example’. But to me his facility with language and English syntax was something of a miracle.

I tried to stay in contact with him, especially later when I got to NYU (2005) and started collaborating with Paul Postal. I would send Haj papers from time to time, and he would send me observations. I was looking forward to learning all kinds of things from him. I had been asking him questions about what it was like to study with Zellig Harris, and he would answer. Now, there is nobody left to ask about that. Here is an excerpt:

“After his syntax class (there were about 25 of us, crunched into a small room, with not enough chairs for us all, none of us cared, we were in the Holy Presence, we knew our great good luck).   At the end of class, some of us would come up to him, with suggestions, questions, requests for a time to see him, the usual. And some questions about syntax. Nothing interesting to report on all of the above, except the questions about syntax. Most of those he would answer immediately, vocally.  But sometimes, rarely, the questioner would have hit something which pierced through to a higher level. He would reach into his righthand pocket of the decrepit jacket he always wore, and pull out a 3X5 yellow pad, and wrote down something that had caught his fancy. After writing it, the pad would go back to its invisible home. Of course, I longed to have a pocketable, 3X5-paddable question to go into the sacred pocket…I can still hope that maybe something that I had asked made it into the sacred pocket.”

Lastly, here is a great syntax observation from Haj, that I just dug up from e-mail today. As far as I know, nobody has ever pursued this observation, which is like a golden nugget.

Fellow negationists –

Just when you thought nothing else could possibly raise:

From an old folk song:

Oh the Erie was a-rising

And the gin was a-gettin’ low

And I scarcely think

We’ll get a drink

Till we get to Buffalo

Till we get to Buffalo.

NB:  *We’ll get a drink till we get to Buffalo.

Peace and Happy New Year!

Haj

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.