Ivan Sag

Ivan Andrew Sag (1949-2013) was an American linguist and cognitive scientist born in Alliance, Ohio, who earned his PhD from MIT under Noam Chomsky in 1976 with a dissertation on ellipsis. He was a principal developer of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and its predecessor, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and later worked on Sign-Based Construction Grammar, integrating HPSG with Construction Grammar; his research addressed syntax, semantics, pragmatics and language processing through constraint-based, lexicalist models of grammar. At Stanford University, where he spent most of his career as the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Linguistics, he authored or co-authored roughly ten books and more than a hundred articles, and the Linguistic Society of America awarded him its Fromkin Prize in 2005; he died of cancer in Menlo Park, California, at age 63.