I’d like to talk about some of the things that I learned about Stan and from Stan during the seventeen years that I knew him   These things are especially precious now that he is gone, but I’m happy to say that I knew these things when Stan was alive and healthy.  They were in fact, for me, the basis of our long friendship.

First, Stan was a very courageous person.  From an early point in his career, he chose to take on the linguistic establishment.  While others believed that a sentence’s organization came from syntactic rules, Stan believed it came from the properties of individual words—a view that eventually became part of the mainstream, incidentally.  While others held that there were multiple levels of syntactic representation—a deep structure, a surface structure, a logical form, and so on, Stan insisted that there was just one level of structure.  And that level of structure was not anything like what mainstream syntactic representations looked like.  There were no V-bars—or even VPs, and no c-command or government either.  It all came down to five simple case relations, as Stan saw it.  For the most part these were not popular ideas and syntacticians being the type of people that they are, Stan had to endure considerable criticism and even scorn during his career.  But that did not stop him.  He attended and spoke at literally dozens of conferences around the world, always fearlessly putting forward his theory, challenging others to tell him why it wasn’t right and why it wasn’t better than what they were doing.  And he didn’t just analyze easy things—he took on the toughest phenomena that language has to offer: case, agreement, ergativity, long-distance dependencies, historical reconstruction, genetic relationships, European languages, Munda languages, Formosan languages, Philippine languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Thai, Japanese, Korean, and so  on.  And he went up against the top scholars in the various fields in which he worked, time and time again, never hesitating and never retreating.

That courage helped carry Stan through the last difficult months.  He dealt with everything—the stress, the pain, the approach of death—with total determination. He worked until just two days before he died and he didn’t give an inch on anything that he believed. 

Second, Stan was an extremely decent person.  From our first conversation, which took place on the first Friday of the 1985 fall semester at Mama Mia’s (now Magoo’s), it was clear that he and I were going to disagree on virtually everything.  (That first conversation was about whether VPs exist, by the way.)  For seventeen years, we debated and disagreed on just about every issue in syntactic analysis that ever came up. But there was NEVER any nastiness in the debates, many of which took place publicly in front of students, during the three syntax seminars that we joyfully co-taught.  In fact, Stan was fond of saying to the students that he wanted them to see that it was possible to disagree without being disagreeable.  True, we pushed each other hard and we were harsh with each other’s ideas, which we both felt was valuable and necessary, but that never prevented us from enjoying our weekly beer and peanuts together at Mama Mia’s on Friday afternoons.

Third, Stan was extraordinarily generous with students, especially those who chose to walk the less traveled path with him and explore the world of language through his beloved theory of  Lexicase.   Even in the 1980s, when I first met him, Stan was already legendary for the time and effort that he gave to students who shared his interest in language and were willing to work very, very hard—as he did.  Many of those students have gone on to success in their own careers, and are able to transmit Stan’s legacy to their students: work hard, be fair, check the facts, don’t be swayed by the latest theoretical fad, no matter how popular it is at the moment.

Stan’s generosity and decency extended way beyond students, though.  A woman, sixty or so years old, who works behind the counter at Magoo’s approached me shortly after she learned of Stan’s death.  “I just loved that man,” she said.  “He just treated me so decently.”  And he did.  When people spoke to Stan, it didn’t matter how much education they had or where they were from.  He listened to them and, he treated them with respect. 

Finally, Stan was totally dedicated to the truth.  His brother Bill recalls that from a very early age and “like his father before him, Stan was honest and blunt”.  That’s exactly right.  Stan was blunt, but above all he was honest.  I never knew him to tell anything but the truth.  He wasn’t always believed, but those of us who knew him and were his friends knew that Stan had the courage to tell the truth no matter what the consequences for himself.

These were the qualities that I admired in Stan and that were the foundation of my friendship with him over almost two decades.  I daresay that these are also the qualities that attracted students, friends and colleagues to him and that now make us miss him so much.  He was at the center of much that went on in this department, both intellectually and socially, for a very long time.   Those of us who knew him realize that, we appreciate that, and we will honor our memory of this good, courageous and honest man forever.

William O'Grady