My graduate years

When I graduated with a 'first' from Cambridge, everyone just seemed to assume that I'd stay on at Cambridge to do a PhD. I set my heart on doing a PhD in Romance Philology. But the head of the Linguistics Department (John Trim) dissuaded me, saying that Philology was the past and Linguistics was the future. So, I thought of doing Romance Phonology instead. But no, apparently Phonology was an intellectual dead end, and Syntax was the only intellectually respectable field to be in. So I thought about a PhD on English Syntax. But it seems that English had been done to death and there was nothing more to find out about it. 'Fine', I said, 'I'll do French syntax instead'. But no -- apparently there were some guys called Kayne and Ruwet working on that. I then thought about Romanian. 'Too many political problems', I was told. So, I finally ended up working on the syntax of Italian, supervised by Pieter Seuren.

Pieter was an inspiring teacher (in the Generative Semantics mould): as a young graduate student (easily led astray) I was enormously impressed when he used to walk into the class room and say 'Forget what I was talking about last week: Jim McCawley just sent me his latest paper yesterday, and I'm going to tell you about that instead.' You really had the feeling you were at the cutting edge of research. But the graduate course which made the most lasting impression on me was Pieter's English Grammar seminar: I remember being so irritated by his attempt to argue that together was derived from with each other that I went through the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and gave him a list of 150 verbs that could take one but not the other. I also remember an occasion on which (in a seminar where Pieter was discussing the syntax of pronouns) I pointed out that in English you can say 'If anyone comes, tell them I'm out.' He refused to accept that it was grammatical, arguing that it couldn't be because it wasn't grammatical in Dutch (his native language), French, German, Italian or Spanish -- even though everyone in the audience (which included Ed Keenan, Geoff Pullum, Bernard Comrie, Nigel Vincent and Jack Hawkins) agreed that it was grammatical in English. 'So it's true what they say about the Dutch', I mused.

Pieter disappeared off to Australia for a couple of years, leaving me to work on my PhD on my own. I started working on the syntax of negative polarity items in Italian (i.e. the Italian counterparts of any, ever, at all etc.): the general idea was to argue that structures which allowed negative polarity items involved some form of covert negation (The provisional title of my PhD was Evidence for Underlying Negation in Italian). But alas, PhDs rarely work out as planned. It turned out that each of the dozen polarity items I looked at had a different distribution, leaving the covert negation hypothesis in tatters. So, after a couple of years, I changed topics and started looking at Raising and ECM structures in Italian. I wrote up a draft of my dissertation while Pieter was still in Australia, and showed it to him when he came back. He described it as 'rubbish'. (I consoled myself with the thought that this was no doubt because there was no Generative Semantics in it), and said that he couldn't understand how anyone could work on subject raising without studying verb raising (in causatives and clitic climbing structures) as well. So, I ended up writing a PhD on raising (of subjects and verbs) in Italian. My eventual dissertation was called Bidirectionality in Raising: it argued for a model of syntax in which grammatical operations were sensitive to grammatical configurations rather than word order.

Life as a graduate student at Trinity College Cambridge was very agreeable -- apart from the College food, which was notoriously indigestible (though I seemed to thrive on it, as you can see in the photo). I used to enjoy early morning punt races on the river with my friends -- and the occasional game of tennis (We'd play 'Best of 3/5/7/9 sets' -- however many it took for me to win). My life was forever transformed when Prince Charles came to study at Trinity. The College authorities decided to install central heating in the particular corner of New Court where he would be living (a security measure, I reasoned with the finely-honed mind of the syntactician: cold bodyguards are no doubt less responsive than centrally heated ones) -- fortunately, it was the corner where I was also living, so at long last I came to enjoy the benefits of central heating (a symbol of decadence previously unheard of at Trinity).

Next, my early academic career.