[Ads-l] 1992 LSA presidential address

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

> On Dec 21, 2019, at 12:58 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
> 
> That’s wonderful, Arnold!  Technology giveth as well as taketh away.  Kudos to Luigi Talamo!

i'm preparing an encomium to him (originally to be part of a posting on my presidential address, but there are now just too many parts).  i asked him for his linguistic biography, and got some really fascinating stuff. 
> 
> It all (your talk) comes back to me, even some of the connections (but alas, not all) you made among (1)-(18).  I do (vaguely) recall the content of the Janda & Sandoval IULC pamphlet, which I still have somewhere in my office.  But the Boswell paper is a revelation.  He was a great historian and a wonderful lecturer (even for non-specialists!—I remember a talk he gave on child abandonment in the medieval period), and his death a great loss here; I attended a very moving memorial service for him at Yale’s Battell Chapel. He died just after the release of his masterwork, _Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe_.  But I hadn’t been familiar with the paper you cite.  

thank you for your good words. i myself am pleased at what i said (and at fairly long draft of a journal version that Luigi also recovered). the paper draft fell prey to the rapid progress of J's dementia, which began in May 1991 and then became my primary occupation until J went into a dementia care facility in 1991, after which it consumed only 2 or 3 hours a day until J died in 2003, but still it burned me out.  and then i just barely avoided dying myself, though i was deeply damaged.  the paper project is clearly dead, but still i'm pleased with what i did back then.

and yes, the Boswell paper is fantastic.

arnold


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