{"id":17135,"date":"2025-05-19T07:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=17135"},"modified":"2025-05-18T12:32:39","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T16:32:39","slug":"john-r-ross-1938-2025-haj-ross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2025\/05\/19\/john-r-ross-1938-2025-haj-ross\/","title":{"rendered":"
John R. Ross 1938-2025 (“Haj Ross”)<\/div>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Sad and momentous news has reached us of the passing of alum and former faculty member John R. Ross<\/strong> (PhD 1967) at the age of 87. Known to one and all as “Haj Ross<\/strong>”, his dissertation and subsequent papers on syntax and related topics laid the groundwork for many \u0097 one might even say “most” \u0097 of the core research topics under central investigation today. His dissertation Constraints on Variables in Syntax<\/a><\/em> (published many years later as a book, under the title Infinite Syntax!<\/em>) built on earlier observations by Chomsky that took note of surprising limitations on our ability to form questions and similar constructions out of particular phrasal domains. Ross’s dissertation showed first that Chomsky’s account of these limitations was inadequate. (“Both too strong and too weak” was his famous formulation of the problem.) But more important, Ross put the nature and extent of these limitations front and center for the entire field, discovering and analyzing a vast range of linguistic phenomena that exemplified such constraints, and proposing unified accounts of many of them that still form the baseline for current research that seeks to extend and deepen Ross’s original insights. In the years following his dissertation, Ross was the author of countless papers of a similar character, in which he was literally the first discoverer of linguistic limitations and possibilities that every speaker of a language knows, even if they were totally unaware (before Ross) that they knew them. Taken together, these discoveries constitute much of the agenda of modern linguistics, which attempts to discern the hidden logic behind the properties of human language that Ross first charted, understanding them as reflections of deeper properties of our human language faculty. We would not be surprised to learn that Ross’s thesis (as it is universally known) is one of the most widely read and widely cited doctoral dissertations in any field \u0097 it surely has that status in linguistics.<\/div>\n
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Every paper by Haj Ross communicated its discoveries in an inimitable fashion, tinged by its author’s unique odd sense of humor and unique feel for language itself. As a consequence, the field of syntax to this day is replete with quirky terminology all due to Haj. Domains that are opaque to syntactic processes such as question formation are universally called “islands” \u0097 Haj’s term. (To appreciate the metaphor, one needs to imagine that boats and the capacity to swim do not exist: you cannot escape a linguistic island.) The ability of question words that move to the front of the sentence (“Which book did Mary talk about?”) to lure other words to join them (“About which book did Mary talk?”) he called “pied-piping”, celebrating the grim legend of the pied-piper of Hamelin. Some of his infamous terminology bordered on the psychedelic: for example, an ellipsis process in questions that deletes the bulk of a sentence while leaving behind the question phrase (“Mary spoke to someone interesting, but I don’t know who ___ “) was dubbed “Sluicing” as a pun on “S loosing” (S for “sentence”; “loosing” in the sense of “untying”). So remarkable, so numerous, and so beloved are Haj’s terminological coinages that they form part of his lasting legacy, along with his scientific achievements, whose mark on the field will never fade.<\/div>\n
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Nothing linguistic failed to interest Haj, and his work ranged across many areas of linguistics. He explored the phonological principles that order phrases such as “snap, crackle, pop” and “red, white, and blue” (i.e. why not “pop, crackle, snap” or “blue, white, and red”, which is the order in French?) \u0097 and studied the linguistic principles underlying poetry in many papers of his later career. Haj was hired as a professor at MIT immediately following his 1967 dissertation, and remained on the faculty until 1985. He subsequently taught at a number of universities internationally, before taking a position at the University of North Texas, where he retired as Distinguished Research Professor in 2021.<\/div>\n
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Haj last visited us at MIT in December 2011 for our conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Linguistics graduate program, where he was an enthusiastic and active participant, and regaled us in typical fashion with both impromptu discoveries and hilarious anecdotes. A giant of linguistics, we and the entire field (and beyond) will miss him.<\/div>\n
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Web page:<\/strong> https:\/\/linguistics.unt.edu\/people\/haj-ross.html<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
Wikipedia:<\/strong> https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_R._Ross<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
Dissertation:<\/strong> https:\/\/dspace.mit.edu\/handle\/1721.1\/15166<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
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Sad and momentous news has reached us of the passing of alum and former faculty member John R. Ross (PhD 1967) at the age of 87. Known to one and all as “Haj Ross”, his dissertation and subsequent papers on syntax and related topics laid the groundwork for many \u0097 one might even say “most” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni-news","category-faculty-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17135"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17157,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17135\/revisions\/17157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}