LINGUIST List 22.1945 Thu May 05 2011 All: Obituary: Jean-Roger Vergnaud Editor for this issue: Danielle St. Jean <daniellelinguistlist.org> To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm Directory         1.     Robert Freidin , Obituary: Jean-Roger Vergnaud Message 1: Obituary: Jean-Roger Vergnaud Date: 29-Apr-2011 From: Robert Freidin <freidinprinceton.edu> Subject: Obituary: Jean-Roger Vergnaud E-mail this message to a friend The following obituary is posted in the context of the upcoming USC Conference "Parallel Domains in Syntax and Phonology" (May 5-7) and the USC May 8th Memorial to celebrate Jean-Roger Vergnaud's life and work. Jean-Roger Vergnaud 1945 - 2011 Jean-Roger Vergnaud, born in Valence, France on August 3rd 1945, died in Los Angeles on January 31st 2011, leaving behind much major work unfinished. His death is an enormous loss for linguistics and more poignantly for his wife and colleague Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, his two sons Sebastian and Raphael and his nephew Jacopo Grazzini Vergnaud, and for those of us who had the great fortune to know him personally as colleagues, collaborators, students, and friends. In 1967 Jean-Roger received an engineering degree from L'Ecole Polytechnique, the most prestigious engineering school in France, entrance into which was via a competitive entrance exam that required several years of grueling preparation. During his time at the Ecole, he also took courses at the University of Paris (Faculté des Sciences). In the following year he did graduate work in mathematics, both pure and applied, and undergraduate work in Phonétique Générale. Jean-Roger entered the graduate linguistics program at MIT in 1969 and received his Ph.D. in 1974 for a dissertation, French Relative Clauses, supervised by Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Ken Hale. In the same year he received a Doctorat de 3éme cycle de Linguistique (the French equivalent of the Ph.D.) from the University of Paris 7 for a dissertation supervised by Maurice Gross. The core idea was the same in both dissertations, but the French version was completely rewritten. In 1982 Jean-Roger received a Doctorat d'Etat es-Sciences, specialité Informatique (in Computer Science because there was no comparable degree in modern linguistics at the time), based on a thesis supervised again by Maurice Gross. This kind of thesis, which no longer exists, was the highest degree in the French educational system, what was presented beyond the Ph.D. to become a full professor. Three years later this thesis was published by John Benjamins as Dépendences et niveaux derepresentation en syntaxe. Jean-Roger began his teaching career in 1968 as a lecturer at the University of Paris 7. During the next decade and a half he also lectured at the University of Paris 8 and at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). From 1970 to 1988 he was also employed by C.N.R.S. in Paris, first as Associate Researcher and then as Senior Researcher in the Computer Science Division. From 1979 to 1981 he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Starting in 1981 he was a Research Affiliate at the M.I.T. Center for Cognitive Science and in 1983 he served as a Research Associate. In the academic year of 1985-1986 he had an appointment as Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Tilburg University and in the following year joined the faculty of the Linguistics Department at the University of Maryland as a full professor. From 1988 until his death he was a member of the faculty in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California as Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities. He was a participant in the USC computer science program (contributing to the creation of a Computational Linguistics Master, initially funded by the Sloan Foundation) as well as in the new USC program in the cognitive sciences, which focuses on those aspects of language that are of interest to psychoneurological theory. In 1977, Jean-Roger joined Jan Koster and Henk van Riemsdijk to co- author a manifesto for a new organization for generative linguistics in Europe, GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World). An endeavor based in the Netherlands with the goal of furthering the study of generative grammar particularly in Europe, GLOW has since its inception been one of the leading organizations in linguistics internationally, its annual meetings traveling as far north as Tromsø and as far south as Morocco, and has led to the creation of a sister organization under the rubric GLOW Asia in Japan, Korea and India. GLOW is an enduring part of Vergnaud's legacy to linguistics. His last participation involved the 2010 annual meeting in Poland, where his student Katy McKinney-Bock presented their joint paper on syntactic grafts. Jean-Roger was one of the rare generative grammarians who made major contributions to both phonology and syntax. In both fields his work has always been concerned with foundational issues. Jean-Roger's contributions to phonology take a definite syntactic turn. His overarching project in phonology from the mid 1980s was to move from a rule-based system to a principles and parameters model. His 1985 article with Jonathan Kaye and Jean Lowenstamm initiates a research program that "incorporates the view that phonology is to be regarded as a system of universal principles defining a class of human phonological systems." His 1987 book, co-authored with Morris Halle, An Essay on Stress, focuses on the most syntactic of phonological processes, proposing that stress assignment is determined by hierarchical metrical constituents whose boundedness is parameterized. This analysis proposes a recoverability condition for constituent structure that involves head location and the direction of government, transformations that move constituent boundaries, and cyclic rules of stress assignment. Subsequent work with Kaye and Lowenstamm (1990) employs a notion of phonological government to characterize what is a possible syllable. Jean-Roger's last published paper in phonology, "On a certain notion of 'occurrence:' the source of metrical structure and much more" (2003), attempts to reverse the trend in separating syntactic and phonological theory by proposing the notion of "occurrence" as a shared foundational concept. His first major contribution to syntax is his 1974 MIT Ph.D. dissertation on French relative clauses, which pioneered the movement analysis of these constructions, an analysis which, with some modifications, has been the standard for over three and a half decades. His 1977 letter to Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik about their manuscript of "Filters and Control" showed how concepts of case and government can be central to the formulation of general principles of grammar, leading to Chomsky's Case Filter and beyond to a theory of syntactic government, which formed the basis of much fruitful research on UG principles and comparative grammar throughout the 1980s--including his joint paper with Alain Rouveret on the distribution of clitics in French causative constructions, which employed notions of case and government and proposed an important alternative to the analysis of clause union phenomena that relied on a device of restructuring. This letter, which was published in a 2008 Festschrift in his honor, remains among the most important documents in the intellectual history of the field. His most recent, and regrettably unfinished, work in syntax was devoted to designing a formal system to unify various parts of current theory under a single architecture utilizing graph theory and based on the idea that the fundamental linguistic relation involved an element and its context. This work exemplifies the Pythagorean character of syntax that might be achieved in pursuing the Galilean style in the science of language, as Noam Chomsky's recent testimony makes clear: "Jean-Roger was a superbly talented linguist, with numerous major contributions to his credit. But the significance of his work went far beyond his careful and influential technical achievements, substantial as these were. His work was inspired by a penetrating vision of what the study of language should strive to become, and how it should find its place within the broader intellectual framework of the understanding of the human mind. His work leaves a particularly rich legacy to be explored by those who have been, and will be, the beneficiaries of his insights. His work, and Jean-Roger himself, will be remembered and honored with particular warmth and poignancy by those of us who were fortunate enough to have known him personally." Jean-Roger Vergnaud had a keen and deep intelligence coupled with a wonderfully unique and infectious sense of humor; he was an extraordinary human being who was in addition kind, considerate and generous. Carlos P. Otero, UCLA Robert Freidin, Princeton University Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 05-May-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.