Ivan Sag
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ivan Sag (born November 9, 1949 in Alliance, Ohio) is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program[1] at Stanford University.
With Carl Pollard, he has written several books that introduce and develop the syntactic theory known as head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). He was also involved with work on generalized phrase structure grammar, HPSG's immediate intellectual predecessor. In addition, he has written numerous articles on problems of linguistic theory and analysis.
His research interests include long-distance dependencies (known more popularly as Wh-Movement), the English auxiliary system, ellipsis, binding, various issues related to the syntax/semantics interface, and syntactic theory's relationship to language processing. His recent work has looked to integrate ideas from construction grammar with ideas already present in HPSG.
Sag got his PhD from MIT in 1976, writing his dissertation (advised by Noam Chomsky) on ellipsis. He received an MA from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied comparative Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, and sociolinguistics, and a BA from the University of Rochester. He was expelled from Mercersburg Academy in 1965.[2]
