2017 Linguistics Retirement Celebration

Bill was better prepared than most at the time to take advantage of these opportunities and push in new directions. That was in part because he came to Austin from Kentucky with a degree in linguistics but also a strong minor in computer science — something that was more unusual at the time than it has since become. But more important than that, he was able to make much of these new opportunities and possibilities because from the start he had the ability to see far and to see deep, to perceive patterns and regularities where others could see only a welter of apparently contradictory facts and observations, see below the surface of things and not to be distracted by technicalities.

The dissertation he wrote in that environment is emblematic of those gifts and is of course still widely read 40 years later. Barbara Partee has always said that Bill's dissertation was the first and most important demonstration that new modes, new kinds of explanation were possible within that emerging framework — modes of understanding that would have been undiscoverable in its absence. In it he showed that complex distributional patterns could yield to elegant explanation if one paid close attention to the entailment relations that they participated in.

Among the regular visitors to Austin in those years was Jorge Hankamer and it was that fact which in part led ultimately to Bill's coming to Santa Cruz. That didn't happen right away though; first there was an appointment at the University of Iowa which Bill took up immediately after earning the PhD. It was in Ames that he and Ken met for the first time and formed the relation that endures to this day. And when Bill moved to Los Angeles to take up a formative visiting appointment at UCLA in 1981, Ken moved with him. And it was there in 1981 that he formed two friendships that would turn out to be crucial both personally and professionally — with Sandy Chung and with Ed Keenan. With Ed especially Bill has always shared a deep intellectual empathy; and in the case of Sandy, although neither of them could have known it in 1981, they were to be partners in many joint adventures, and to be colleagues, collaborators and coauthors.

It was a couple of years later (in 1984) that he joined the Board of Studies in Linguistics here at Santa Cruz. In the period of rapid growth and renewal initiated by Jorge when he moved here from Cambridge, Bill was the third to be hired, after Judith Aissen and Geoff Pullum. And we (in the department and on the campus) have had the benefits of his gifts ever since — as researcher, as teacher, as mentor, as colleague and finally as administrator and academic leader. Others will be talking about his gifts as a mentor and teacher. As a researcher he has continued to make contributions of central importance to issues that are also of central importance – negation and negative polarity always (witness the famous SALT paper "Expressing Negation"), on quantification and the semantics of complex nominals, on judgment and judgment-types, on ellipsis and much more. He has always been a great collaborator and the joint work that he did with me and Sandy on ellipsis in the middle 1990s was (for me at least) a joy to be a part of. That collaboration continued and continues. And then there was a new collaboration — in the joint work with Sandy on modes of composition, which resulted in the important 2004 monograph from MIT press (Restriction and Saturation), in a 2007 paper in Natural Language Semantics, and in a more recent paper finished and submitted just a couple of days ago. What runs through all of this work is a deep intelligence — an ability to see below the surface of things and discern patterns that are invisible to most observers. There is an impatience with merely technical solutions to hard problems and there is especially a large, expansive, undogmatic and ambitious view of what the field could and should be about. You see the breadth and depth of that ambition especially in the long and hard struggle with the issue of judgment types — Brentano's "thetic" and "categorical" judgments.

There's a paper of Bill's from 1988 which is not as well known as I think it ought to be, but which demonstrates all of these qualities and more besides: on "levels" and "strata" in linguistic theory. This is not a paper on semantics but rather about the architecture of linguistic theory. And in that paper he brings a rationality and calm to debates that had become overheated and clouded by sloganeering — by what were better seen as terminological disputes than disagreements of substance. And it is those gifts that also came to the fore as he gradually moved into higher and higher levels of academic leadership and responsibility — the ability to see far, to see deep, to see ahead, to always be rational, and to see past small and temporary disputes. I remember him calling a meeting in the LCR — it must have been sometime in the early or middle 1990s — in which he warned all of his colleagues that there was this thing called the "world wide web" just on the horizon, that it was about to change all of our lives, and that we had better be prepared for it. That was the meeting at which I learned what a URL was.

And through all of the various roles that he has taken on over the years, every one of them demanding — Chair of the Department, Provost of Cowell College, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Dean of Humanities, Dean of the Arts, his ongoing work with WASC — the accreditation body for universities in California, Hawaii, and most of the Pacific — he has brought a mix of rationality and selflessness that is sadly rare. And to the daunting challenges he has faced in those positions he has brought both a deep intelligence and a deep empathy — the ability to look at the world from behind the eyes of the person you are working with or in apparent conflict with. The university will miss those gifts. But as linguists and as Bill's colleagues and friends we can continue to look forward to the many benefits that they bring to those who are fortunate enough to know him and to work with him.

How did Bill manage to produce such a diverse and successful group of students? We'd like to propose three explanatory factors:

• First, Bill always carefully assessed the strengths, weaknesses, and interests of each of his advisees. Rather than trying to make us all fit a particular mold or to create a school of thought, as is unfortunately all too common in linguistics, his goal was to help each of us develop in whatever way we were most likely to be most successful.
• Second, the level of understanding he aspires to achieve when he confronts a topic of research considerably surpasses what is typical even for an academic. This depth of reflection set a high standard, making us better scholars than we would otherwise have been.
• Third, Bill is very highly respected by other semanticists. We both have had the following experience many times over the years: we meet a well-known figure in the field, they learn that Bill was our advisor, and their face lights up. "Oh!" they say, and what they mean is: "Now I'm going to take you seriously."

And Bill has made us better advisors in our own right. Here are some of Bill's wise sayings that we have made our own:

• Good ideas are cheap; the hard part is working them out.
• When you argue against another researcher's analysis, you need to argue against the best possible version of that account.
• Every great example sentence is great for many reasons.
• [On including a bit of formalism in a general talk:] It's good to show a glint of steel beneath the velvet glove.
• You need to be more critical of your own work than any referee could possibly be.

After internalizing standards this high, it's a wonder any of us ever published anything!

Finally, we'd like to comment on a different aspect of Bill's career: his long record of service in administration. We have often heard our semanticist colleagues lament that the time Bill devoted to administration diminished his contributions to semantic theory. However, in recent years both of us have become involved in administration (as Vice Dean for the College of Arts and Science at NYU and as Vice Rector at Pompeu Fabra University). As a result, we understand and appreciate the profound value of Bill's insight, judgment, diplomacy, and commitment in an area where these qualities are too often lacking. His example and occasional mentoring has helped us in this part of our work as well. Without contributions like Bill's, life would be much harder for those same complaining semanticist colleagues.

We thank Bill for his inspiring service to scholarship, as a theorist, as a teacher, as a mentor, and as an administrator.

What followed was, for me, an intensely satisfying period of intellectual activity and personal growth. It is easy, but also accurate, to attribute this to the energy and spirit Sandy brought to the endeavor. In our first several trips out to the Marianas, I witnessed in Sandy an enviable and satisfying combination of scientific acumen with very human warmth and kindness. By acumen, I refer to Sandy's remarkable ability to see the best path forward among a morass of options, an ability perhaps underwritten by a kind of tension in her thinking between analytic playfulness and sanity. By warmth, I refer to her perceptive, communitarian outlook. In academia, it is easy to become predominantly inwardly oriented and to not listen to the people by whom we are nurtured and to whom we have a responsibility. In the field that attitude is untenable; and in the academic department or university committee or classroom, just as unproductive.

Perhaps the single most valuable gift to emerge from our collaboration is simply the time spent together: listening to the stories, and their retellings, of her life as a child in the Bay Area; her start as a young linguist; those whose influence had mattered to her and why; episodes in the development of our department, etc. Apart from being showcases for Sandy's great sense of humor, they are also blueprints for how one can grow into a life of balance and honest achievement. I remain deeply grateful to Sandy for all she has shared with me just as I remain buoyed by excitement for what we have yet to discover.

Sandy started her career as a linguist with undergraduate work at Harvard on Maori, Samoan, and Tongan, later working on the comparative syntax of Polynesian for her dissertation, also at Harvard. Much of her work since 1977 — 40 incredible years of dedication to date — has been on Chamorro. She has made major contributions in a range of important areas, including wh-agreement and successive cyclicity, identity conditions on ellipsis licensing, verb first word order, and many others. With Bill, she has leveraged her knowledge of Chamorro and Maori to build arguments about the nature of semantic composition (one among many examples of her work at the grammatical interfaces).

Both her research and her mentorship of students share a core set of commitments and principles which might, to a UCSC student, seem apparent, but are actually hard fought and won. At the core of her approach is a commitment to whole language description, which means fusing thoughtful philological work with theoretical rigor and acuity. It means sticking close to the idea that analyses should be consistent with one's broad and deep view of the nature of the language at hand and its particular properties. She has, by example and by explicit instruction, led generations of students to aspire to exactly this kind of linguistic analysis.

As an advisor, Sandy's contributions are important and enduring. She holds her students to high standards, and is always game to think creatively about analyses and their consequences (even if she does not agree). Her style of questioning seems to have given birth to its own sui generis cult of personality, as evidenced in the title of her recent Festschrift, Asking the Right Questions. Sandy's approach, in her work and her advising, is honest, clear, and strong. She sticks to her principles in both empirical and theoretical inquiry, and in doing so has demonstrated that it's possible to make the best kind of progress with this approach, all while reaching for deeper insight.

By way of closing: I mentioned to a colleague that I'd be here today. She said, "please make sure to use the words 'formidable presence.'" That pretty much sums it up.

The next year Mitzi Morris, Chris Barker, and I began as UCSC Linguistics' pioneer PhD class. One of our first classes took place in Kresge College. Sandy Chung — then on loan from UC San Diego (Jorge had exaggerated a bit) — taught our introduction to Government and Binding Theory. I immediately realized that I was in the presence of brilliance. Sandy had a disarming self-effacing quality that sometimes obscured a core of incredible intellectual depth (I say "sometimes" because this depth, while sometimes below the surface, often emerged in full force). She had (and has) a passion for syntactic analysis and seeks the perfect balance between theoretical sophistication and respect for data.

Over the next four and a half years I was extremely fortunate to be trained by a syntactic dream team; one that included Jim McCloskey and that was co-chaired by Sandy and Judith Aissen. Sandy and the others always pushed me to my limits, always demanded excellence, but did so with respect and affection. Even though I was far from being a colleague, they treated me like one. I remember the copious comments Sandy wrote on everything I produced, including multiple dissertation drafts. This level of commitment was well beyond what I have observed elsewhere.

I credit Sandy and others at UCSC with preparing me to meet the rigors of academia. They served as role models in research, teaching, graduate training, and academic politics. Throughout the 25 years I have been at UC San Diego, I have used their examples as I negotiated the three legs of the academic stool. I have been fortunate to have inherited the "Santa Cruz" method of inductive instruction, to have done my best to emulate the eclectic, yet rigorous, approaches to research, and to attempt to channel the political acumen that has been the hallmark of UCSC Linguistics.

Congratulations Sandy on a stellar career that has guided the careers of so many of us — some now approaching retirement age ourselves. I wish you the very best — I suspect you may be more selective in your commitments, but I doubt you will be slowing much.

That article showed qualities typical of Armin's work. First, it clarified the theoretical issues. When I say "clarified" I mean not only that it put known issues clearly, something Armin does outstandingly, but that it made clear what the issues were — essentially helping to define a research agenda for the field. Second, it provided a beautiful empirical case study based on a deep understanding of the language. Armin has often joked about how well he fits in this department, since he works on understudied languages like German and Japanese. Joke taken. But his work really is of a piece with the department, advancing theory at the highest level based on empirical analyses of specific languages that are scrupulously authoritative. His paper on the trochee in Latin, published in 1994 in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, is another early example.

As I think about these general qualities of his work, I see another way in which the Beatles reference is right. Like most people, I believe the members of the Beatles did their very best work together, and not when they had separated. Maybe this was a matter of competition among them. I like to see it in a more positive way: around greatness we are inspired to be the best we can be too. If I had not had Armin as a colleague to look up to, I'm sure that my own work, and career, would not have been as good or interesting. I want to thank him for that.

Armin was an early adopter of Optimality Theory. Shortly after I arrived at UC Santa Cruz, Armin, Junko, and I were asked to review the famous Prince and Smolensky and McCarthy and Prince 1991 manuscripts for publication. We wrote the review in the summer, sometimes contemplating the details in the jacuzzi on the deck of their house. I don't know about Armin, but I view this as a watershed moment in my career, because we really had to learn Optimality Theory (OT) inside and out. Armin immediately began to apply its insights about constraint ranking and violability to problems that seemed intractable. In doing so, Armin defined a new role for himself as a leading thinker in OT, a role he has maintained for his career. Over the years this work led to new insights in underspecification theory again, in derivational opacity, in constraint conjunction and the Obligatory Contour Principle, in all areas of prosody, especially above the word level, and in the "core-periphery" structure of the lexicon and how constraint ranking illuminates it. Here I'll focus on prosody and on the lexicon, addressing two of his most longstanding and influential research programs.

In Armin's work on the core-periphery structure of the lexicon, focusing particularly on Japanese, he defined and developed an entirely new area of phonology. At the heart of this program is the idea that a language's vocabulary is organized into a hierarchy of "strata of foreignness" that are in a subset-superset relationship. This claim, captured by means of articulated faithfulness constraints and constraint ranking, amounts to a much more restrictive and interesting theory of lexical strata, one whose implicational predictions are borne out in Japanese and other languages. This work has been pioneering.

His work in the area of prosody has been so wide-ranging and sustained that is difficult to sum up, and impossible to do justice to. Armin has repeatedly combined the insights of constraint ranking and violability with insights specific to prosody, bringing a level of sophistication and nuance to our understanding of prosody that have been rarely matched by anyone. His insights about "weak layering" were an early example of this. His much more recent work on recursion in prosody can be seen as complementary to this, violating expectations of strict layering "in the opposite direction," as it were. With this work (and along with Selkirk and Ito) he has again defined a new research agenda in phonology, one that provides more elegant generalizations about prosody, along with a simplification of the inventory of prosodic categories. (An example of the latter: arguing for the elimination of the "major phrase"-"minor phrase" category distinction in Japanese.) His dedication to theoretical elegance guides again his very recent work on the "perfect prosodic word" (a notion so appealing as to make the name doubly apt) in analyses of Danish stød and Japanese unaccentedness.

Armin's retirement is a loss to us, but not in every way. I am very pleased to be able to announce to everyone here that he has been appointed Research Professor of Linguistics. I couldn't be happier to know that he will continue to be my colleague.

Armin, congratulations.

Armin's ideas were very exciting and influential in shaping new insights in phonology in the early days of OT, when I was here, but they are still very much shaping phonological theory today.

Most of all, as a student I was struck by how Armin's work consistently accomplished broad explanations of phonological patterns using very simple ideas and structures. This deeply influenced my approach to research both as a student and now. When I was a new graduate student, I rather thought that complexity would be more scholarly than simplicity, but Armin helped me to see otherwise.

If memory serves me correctly, the first course I took with Armin was Phonology B, which dealt with metrical structure. I remember seeing sketches of foot parsing fly across the chalkboard, and it was especially thrilling when Armin put his arm on his head in thinking about an answer to a question, because that indicated that the question was so deep and interesting that it required arm-to-head contact to ponder it.

My phonology QP was on prominence-driven stress, which drew inspiration from ideas about licensing and optimization that were developed in Armin's work. I recall that an exciting highlight of that QP research was when it was accepted for presentation at NELS at MIT.

This conference was all the more exciting because there were also presentations by other students and faculty from Santa Cruz, namely Jason Merchant, Chris Kennedy, and Jim McCloskey. I remember being on stage at that conference at the same time as Chomsky, though it was only because he was sitting there while prizes were being handed out, and my name was drawn for a free conference T-shirt. Nevertheless, Armin helped to bring me to that signature moment in my student career.

Over the longer term, the discussions I had with Armin in the course of writing my QP sparked a long term interest in syllable prominence that ultimately led to my book on the influence of syllable prominence in vowel patterns in language, which was published by Cambridge a few years ago and helped me to get promoted to full professor, so I am very grateful to him for that.

Wrapping up, over the course of Armin's career, I've been continually impressed by how productive and inventive he is in his research. Armin continues to be a model to me of how to use concepts of minimal complexity to maximal effect. My reference to the terms minimal and maximal here is not accidental. Armin and Junko's more recent work on minimal and maximal prosodic categories has given rise to an industry of new work on solving problems in the structure of prosodic words and higher levels of prosody. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, I served on a committee for a dissertation on the phonology-syntax interface that centers on the concept of recursion, which their theory makes possible.

So I hope that retirement for Armin does not mean an end to his research but rather frees him up from other responsibilities to continue to bring inspiring and creative ideas to the field.