{"id":51897,"date":"2021-08-26T08:39:03","date_gmt":"2021-08-26T13:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51897"},"modified":"2021-08-26T16:49:45","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T21:49:45","slug":"martin-kay-1935-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51897","title":{"rendered":"Martin Kay, 1935-2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

I learned about Martin Kay's recent passing from a brief obit on the ACL's web site — Tim Baldwin, \"Vale Martin Kay<\/a>\":<\/p>\n

It is with a profound sense of loss that, on behalf of the ACL Exec, I announce the passing of Martin Kay on August 7, 2021.<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin was a pioneer and visionary of computational linguistics, in the truest sense of those terms. He made seminal contributions to the field in areas including parsing, unification grammars, finite state methods, and machine translation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin was educated at the University of Cambridge, before moving to the USA and working at Rand Corporation from 1961 to 1972. He was Chair of the Department of Computer Science at University of California Irvine from 1972 to 1974, before moving to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1985, he took up a position as Professor at Stanford University, and split his time between Xerox PARC and Stanford until 2002.<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin was awarded the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, and was Chair of the International Committee for Computational Linguistics from 1984 to 2016. But perhaps equally for those who had the good fortune of knowing him personally or attending an event that he spoke at, he was a warm, generous, extraordinarily funny, disarmingly down-to-earth man whose loss is felt keenly.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I knew Martin mainly through his many influential publications<\/a> — we only shared a few real-world interactions. But my most vivid memory of him is an informal observation, half a century ago, about the interpretation of intonational focus in certain phrases. See \"Another step towards gender equality<\/a>\" (8\/20\/2006) and \"Dogless in Albion<\/a>\" (9\/12\/2011). From the second of those posts:<\/p>\n

\"\"Whenever I visit England, I'm struck by the fact that escalators, moving walkways, and other public conveyances commonly have signs requiring users to carry dogs. I also always remember\u00a0Martin Kay's observation<\/a>\u00a0that phrasal stress on the subject (\"DOGS must be carried\") suggests the absurd interpretation that \"you can't use this facility unless you are carrying a dog\", whereas stress on the verb remains consistent with the intended meaning \"if you have a dog, you must carry it rather than have it go on its own feet\".<\/p>\n

As far as I know, this pattern is still pretty much a mystery, though there's a relevant literature<\/a>, Quite a few of those publications attribute the example to one or another of Michael Halliday's works, though I've checked three of the alleged sources without finding it.<\/p>\n

But it doesn't matter here whether Martin Kay invented this, or learned it from Halliday, or got it from a joke current\u00a0 in British culture at large. The point is that it was typical of him to invent (or register) and transmit striking linguistic examples, just as he invented (or improved) and transmitted important technical problems and solutions in computational linguistics.<\/p>\n

His publications list reminds me of the extraordinary breadth of his work<\/a>, both in terms of its topics and its audiences.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I learned about Martin Kay's recent passing from a brief obit on the ACL's web site — Tim Baldwin, \"Vale Martin Kay\": It is with a profound sense of loss that, on behalf of the ACL Exec, I announce the passing of Martin Kay on August 7, 2021. Martin was a pioneer and visionary of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51897"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51907,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51897\/revisions\/51907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}