Ivan was a large and brilliant man, the world feels like a smaller place without him. Ivan loved to drink, he loved to eat, he loved ideas, he loved his wife and he loved his friends. We loved him right back.
Ivan made significant contributions to the fields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language processing. He wrote at least 10 books and over 100 articles. Ivan was the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Professor of Linguistics, and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Linguistic Society of America, in 2005 he received the LSA’s Fromkin Prize for distinguished contributions to the field of linguistics. All of which is to say that he was a brilliant wonderful man who I proudly call my uncle (even though he is in fact my first cousin, once removed). He will be missed.
A true scientist, Ivan was proud to live and die as an atheist.
