Born in Alliance, Ohio on November 9, 1949, Sag attended the Mercersburg Academy but was expelled shortly before graduation. He received a Bachelor from the University of Rochester, an Master of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied comparative Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, and sociolinguistics, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, writing his dissertation (advised by Noam Chomsky) on ellipsis.
Sag was the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Professor of Linguistics, and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. Sag made notable contributions to the fields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language processing. More recently, he worked on Sign-Based Construction Grammar, which blended HPSG with ideas from Berkeley Construction Grammar.
In general, his research late in life primarily concerned constraint-based, lexicalist models of grammar, and their relation to theories of language processing.
He was the author or co-author of 10 books and over 100 articles He was honored by a volume of studies published in 2013 in his honor, The Core and the Periphery: Data-Driven Perspectives on Syntax Inspired by Ivan A. Sag, edited by Philip Hofmeister and Elisabeth Norcliffe.
, Gerald Gazdar, Thomas Wasow and Steven Weisler. 13. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and, Thomas Wasow, and Emily Bender.
His early work was as a member of the research teams that invented and developed HPSG as well as generalized phrase structure grammar, HPSG"s immediate intellectual predecessor.
