In 1962, when Leonard Babby entered HarvardÕs PhD program in Slavic Languages and Literatures, we were still undergraduates in Harvard's Linguistics major. Our respective friendships with Leonard began in courses by Roman Jakobson, Horace Lunt, and Charles Townsend, and continued as one of us went into MIT's program in Linguistics, the other into HarvardÕs Slavic program. The Zeitgeist was like WordsworthÕs description of the French Revolution at its commencement:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! Ñ Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

MIT's program in Linguistics was freshly founded. American doctoral programs in Slavic with a focus on Linguistics were still relatively new then as well; their broad mission, designed by Roman Jakobson in the 1950s, included strong training in Slavic philology (and ability to read the classic studies in French and German), a grounding in Praguean (or rather, Jakobsonian) theory of grammar and poetics, acquaintance with more than one Slavic language, plus a demonstrated ability to speak, write, and teach oneÕs major Slavic language, this last requiring a solid background in that languageÕs literature and culture. These requirements, and the fearsome hurdle of the General Exams in multiple fields, left few opportunities to explore linguistic theories. Nonetheless, Leonard had by 1965 become a regular at Linguistics lectures at Harvard and MIT.

Roman Jakobson had since 1957 held an appointment at MIT, where he taught in alternate terms, while maintaining his connection with Harvard as the Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Recruiting Jakobson helped launch MITÕs fledgling Linguistics program by enabling it to host the IXth International Congress of Linguists in 1962, the first one ever held outside Europe. JakobsonÕs role was oddly parallel to SaussureÕs posthumous part in the launching of the Prague Circle at the First Congress in 1929Ña big name cited to lend respectability to a new venture, selectively praised, selectively challenged or ignored. At MIT in the prestigious position of Institute Professor, Jakobson was hailed mainly for his contributions to phonology, as his inventory of distinctive features (but not his typology of oppositions) was built into Chomsky and HalleÕs nascent generative phonology. It is sometimes claimed that Chomsky carried out a revolution against all previous structuralisms by seeking mentalistic models of language. Yet unlike American linguistics of the 1930s and 1940s, JakobsonÕs views were mentalist too. He had an explicit interest in language acquisition, and here as everywhere else in language studies, he sought universals. One could well call him a theorist with minimalist-essentialist tastes.

But Jakobson's view of linguistic subsystems as bundles of oppositions was sorely challenged by syntax, which his models failed to illuminate as well as they did word-size or smaller units like those in the rich inflectional systems of Slavic languages. As younger linguists and students flocked to MIT to hear Chomsky and Ross lecture on generative syntax, JakobsonÕs Harvard lectures deplored the "syntactic imperialism" that focused on constituent structure while ignoring morphology and semantics. To some extent, Jakobson was right: Where earlier conventional practice had meant starting with the smallest elements and working up, first describing a language's phonology, then its morphology, and maybe someday the syntax, Chomsky had turned linguistics upside down. He made syntax central, treating inflectional morphology as predictable from syntax and rather trivialÑ as something concrete for the phonological component to interpret. This view, we must now recognize, comes easier when one has in mind the vestigial inflectional system of English, rather than Slavic, where every word-form expresses numerous categories simultaneously. When syntax upstaged morphology, the latter was relegated to a decade of obscurity. General linguists have only recently returned to the classical issues illustrated in Slavic morphology. In the Slavic field, however, students were, and still are, expected to know how Jakobson analyzed the morphology of their various languages, for better or for worse.

Students of "Linguistics and Slavic languages" or of "Slavic Linguistics" thus found themselves at the intersection of two changing "scientific paradigms": Besides the changing norms introduced into linguistic practice by the Chomskyan revolution, the canon taught in Slavic departments was increasingly challenged as new questions arose in work across languages, and especially in new explorations in syntax. Our use of the term "scientific paradigm" owes less to Kuhn's concept of scientific revolutions (where one set of norms is replaced by another set), than to McCawley's view of "normal science" as an evolving set of "markedness conventions" where certain views, methods, and omissions are default options needing no justification or explanation, while departures from that norm carry some cost. The cost of deviation varies, ranging from a need for more detailed specification or justification, all the way to considerable professional risk.

Babby's own early career could be an example of risk-taking. He had written his M.A. thesis under Jakobson, who therefore looked upon him as "his student." Accustomed to European-style control over his students' choices of topic, Jakobson had a Ph.D. thesis in mind for Leonard: preparing a critical edition of A.A. BarsovÕs grammar of Russian (written between 1783 and 1788), philosophically-minded and very modern for its day. Leonard balked. Since the Soviets were denying access to the three extant copies of the lost original, he would have had to work from poor photostatic reproductions of those copies. And he may have known or suspected that a Western edition of a text risked being one-upped by the almost simultaneous appearance in the USSR of a less costly and better produced version.(1)

Most important, Leonard had already chosen a topic in syntax that would provide a novel syntactic account of a vexed morphological problemóthe distribution and use in Russian of long and short adjective forms. It took courage to cross Jakobson, who reportedly never forgave him, but it was the best decision Leonard could have made. Leonard's work on the syntax of adjectives started him on a distinguished career at the intersection of two fields, generative syntax and Slavistics, each with its own changing definitions of what constitutes "normal science" or its "scientific paradigm," i.e., of "what goes without saying" and what needs more support when presented to one audience or another. (2)

While for American ("Bloomfieldian") structuralists, the Chomskyan revolution began with the 1957 Syntactic Structures, linguists in Russia, and Slavists generally, saw in SS a normal development of American structuralism (for instance, in the volume Osnovnye napravlenija strukturalizma, edited by Guxman and Jarceva, Moscow 1964). In Russia, SS seemed a continuation of the syntactic work of Chomsky's teacher Zellig Harris, whose approach to syntax was known in the Slavic world through Dean S. WorthÕs 1958 Harvard thesis on the syntax of instrumental constructions. (Major works of all three scholars Harris, Chomsky, and Worth appeared in Russian translation in Novoe v lingvistike, a series launched by Moscow University linguist V. A. Zvegincev in 1962.)

Generative grammar began to have a major impact on Slavic linguistics only after Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), and especially after John Robert (Haj) Ross' MIT thesis Constraints on Variables in Syntax (1967) with its citations of Russian counterexamples to the Left Branch Condition. The introduction of recursion into syntax brought a rush to mine the recursive processes Coordination, Complementation, Relativization were studied as actively in Slavic as they were in English. Robert A. RothsteinÕs 1966 Harvard thesis on Polish complements was completed soon after Peter Rosenbaum's 1965 M.I.T. thesis on English predicate complement constructions and was soon available in dittoed form. Similar topics were independently and simultaneously researched in the U.S. and in England and also circulated widely in photocopies: Bernard Comrie at KingÕs College Cambridge and Catherine V. Chvany at Harvard approached Russian complementation from different directions; Wayles Browne at MIT (later Zagreb), Leonard Babby at Harvard, and Roland Sussex at London analyzed relative clauses and/or adjectives, respectively in Serbo-Croatian, Russian, and Russian-cum-Polish. The issue of "parts of speech," including the so-called "category of state," was a hot topic for a while, as were impersonal sentences. The works of these and other pioneers are represented in Brecht and ChvanyÕs Slavic Transformational Syntax, a 1974 collection containing LeonardÕs article on "parts of speech" as a theoretical problem, a reprint of a review of Galkina-FedorukÕs book on impersonal sentences by MITÕs Edward S. Klima, and a bibliography by Roland Sussex showing "Slavic transformationalia" to be quantitatively second only to studies dealing with English.

Attempts to formalize statements from traditional grammar uncovered many inadequacies in those statements, and brought to light many unnoticed distinctions and novel generalizations. Interest that was aroused among Western Slavists was due less to the formal-theoretical issues discussed than to the descriptive improvements and new analyses brought in by the theory's heuristic power. By the time translations appeared in Slavic countries, the theoretical issues were obsolescent but the harvest of new observations still had an impact on indigenous theoretical issues. Leonard Babby was one of several Fulbright lecturers who tried to introduce American formal syntax in Slavic countries in those first decades, but found them more hospitable to semantics-based or "functionalist" work, which translated better and was considered more relevant to Soviet priorities, such as describing the vanishing or endangered languages of Siberia or the Caucasus.

In this country, too, Slavists' suggestions for improvements in the theory drew little attention outside the Slavic field. Most newly hatched MIT PhDs and their students who were launching new programs throughout the country used the inherited inventory of four "parts of speech"Ñcategories inherited from American structuralism, with no interest in issues of hybrid categories like category-of-state predicates, long-form (noun-like) vs. short-form (verb-like) adjectives, gerunds (adverb-like), participles (NP-like), or even infinitivesÑverb forms that could be sentential subjects, hence NPs by definition (contra X-bar theory, though found not only in Slavic but in Latin, French, and other languages, even in English). Nor was there interest in suggestions to amend the theory to account in a principled way for "impersonal" (subjectless) sentences in Slavic and many other languages. Meanwhile, developments in "mainstream" syntax made it less and less compatible with Slavic languages: When Preposition replaced Adverb as the fourth "part of speech" (JackendoffÕs article in the 1973 Halle Festschrift edited by Steve Anderson and Paul Kiparsky), and case theory assumed a preposition for all oblique phrases, it entailed counterintuitive accounts of the prepositionless obliques in Slavic; and in the late 1970s, when the EPP made its debut, the dogma of the obligatory subject pushed impersonal sentences off the mainstream theoretical agenda.

Through it all, Leonard continued to chip away at these problems. Rather than devalue description, like mainstream generativists, he found in his own work, and taught his students, that clues to solving many a theoretical problem may be found in the more exceptional, hard-to-describe constructions. This approach has yielded classic works on several important theoretical issues and led his students to further fruitful explorations.

By about 1980, however, nearly all Babby's fellow Slavic syntax pioneers had moved away from mainstream formal syntax, exploring complementary areas of linguistics and doing research closer to the missions of their respective Slavic or Foreign Language departments.

The best thing that could have happened to Len in the 1970's was his move from Princeton's then shrinking Slavic Department to Cornell's Division of Modern Languages and Linguistics, where he had graduate students in Linguistics (with at least a minor in Slavic), and fellow linguists who shared his interest in generative grammar and the problems he was working on. The opportunity to "faire école" enabled him to continue to try to reform formal syntax from within, as it were. In the Cornell tradition of not specializing in just one language area, Leonard added Turkish to his repertoire, organized courses in it, and even served as Chair of the Near Eastern Studies Department in 1988-89. Since Turkish and Lithuanian, another recent addition to his range, are languages with extensive and significant morphology, he can treat them the same way as he does Slavic: they have material devices to express, say, the passive or causative, and he can find the syntactic substructure which calls for one device or another. He keeps up his several languages by reading novels and mysteries, sources of wonderful examples to illustrate his theoretical works. His note cards are legendary among his students and friends, with examples in tiny script, in two or three colors. As we recall Leonard's most characteristic pose, whether in graduate school or in his Cornell or Princeton offices, it is that of putting something down on paper. When reading any of Leonard's writings, one can be certain of the reliability of his data: every example is either attested in print or double-checked with native speakers.

His bibliography shows him working on a few well-defined and related issues, with rare side trips into reviews or general musings. We see him returning many times to the same problem, improving the treatment, bringing in more telling examples, testing the most recent theoretical claims and then either applying or rejecting them explicitly.

As he works on a series of approximations to the truth, one topic segues into another. We cite a few examples (for more see his list of publications). The thesis on adjectives led to the issue of parts of speech and, since short-form adjectives include passives, this work led him naturally into studies of diathesis and voice, and thence into causatives in Turkish. Considering the mystery of passives that can occur with the genitive of negation, he had to explore other contexts of this genitive, a study culminating in his 1980 book Existential sentences and negation in Russian. When the theory of the time could not account for the behavior and interpretation of word order in those sentences, he turned to the Praguean (but not Jakobsonian) notion of themerheme structure. He was the first to show explicitly what is now taken for granted (though rarely credited to him): that formal sentence syntax must be complemented by an account of the informational structure of the sentence and of the discourse beyond the sentence, for theme-rheme is not coterminous with the given-new distinction. That book demonstrated that both linguistic traditions could provide complementary insights into language. Developments in case theory led him to return again and again to case marking in Russian, including its behavior in quantified phrases, and the semantic contribution of (prepositionless) genitive, partitive, and instrumental cases in various constructions.

Having a special interest in characteristics of individual lexical items, he was among the first North American Slavists to get acquainted with the work of Igor Mel‹uk on lexical functions and tryÑ with only moderate successÑto bring it to the attention of his colleagues. His work on voice has been influenced by the work of Mel‹uk and by that of the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Academy of Sciences group led by Xolodovi‹ and later Xrakovskij. The notion of diathesis and change of diathesis has fit very well into his own approach which stresses theta-roles within the lexical entry and their connection with syntactic frames.

By 1991, Leonard was recruited back to Princeton, whose revived Ph.D. programs in Slavic and in Linguistics gave him a chance to develop a new profile for linguists specializing in Slavic. His Princeton students not only can but are required to get a strong grounding in theory in the Linguistics program. Since 2000 their doctorates have in fact been in "General and Slavic Linguistics." In Princeton, as at Cornell, his students contribute to generative theory while exploring its limits, drawing on the complementary Slavistic and functionalist heritage as needed. Our sampling of them is unavoidably partial in the sense of being incomplete, but gaps are not meant invidiously.

Marjorie McShane's 1999 thesis on ellipsis of direct objects in Russian and Polish demonstrates that an adequate account must include both formal sentence-syntax and discourse analysis. McShane went on to a research position at New Mexico State University. James Lavine of Bucknell University, a guest editor of this issue, has worked on problems where mainstream analyses of agreement fail, finding elements of ergative typology in Baltic and Northern Russian. Loren Billings, now of National Chi Nan University in Taiwan after stints in Germany and Thailand, is known for his 1995 thesis Approximation in Russian and the single-word constraint treating the syntax-morphology and even the syntax-phonology interfaces; he has also (with Joan Maling) contributed a large bibliography on seeming passive participles which take the government pattern of an active verb (the Ukrainian/ Polish -no/-to construction).

Edit Jakab's 2000 thesis and a series of papers from the University of Quebec at Montreal treat modal uses of morphological forms in Slavic and adjoining languages. Non-canonical usage of forms, like the Russian imperative with conditional meaning, turns out to go with non-canonical syntactic structures instructive for the general linguist. Abby Konopasky now teaches linguistics at the University of New Orleans; her 2001 thesis dealt with syntactic and morphological problems of clitics in Serbian and Croatian. Stephanie Harves, now teaching at Harvard, has completed a thesis on the syntax of "unaccusatives" in Russian and written about a number of the classic problems: genitive of negation, copulas, quantified constructions. Several more students are in the Princeton pipeline.

Leonard's Cornell graduate students continue for the most part in a similar vein, straddling both paradigms. Stephen Franks and Gerald Greenberg, who have joint appointments in Linguistics and Slavic, respectively at Indiana University and Syracuse University, need little introduction. Franks is a founder and now editor-in-chief of JSL; he writes on such central Slavic-linguistic topics as clitics and quantificational phrases. Greenberg, a guest editor of this issue, has investigated dative subjects of infinitives in Russian and across Slavic, using both generative and traditional Russian linguistic approaches. In one 1996 work he traces the interaction of theory and data in successive generative analyses of the Russian gerund, an account that was more recently continued, with an additional new hypothesis, in Babby and Franks 1998.

Alexander Nakhimovsky of Colgate University sought to introduce results from Mel‹uk's Meaning Text approach to American linguistics. Co-author of a series of textbooks, he has pioneered pedagogical applications of Mel‹ukÕs ideas. John Bailyn of SUNY at Stony Brook, who began under Babby but finished his thesis after BabbyÕs departure from Cornell, is perhaps the first to combine in the same study generative-syntax movement constraints, Praguean themerheme analysis, and language acquisition.

Richard House has remained immortalized in the circle of students for devoting a 1982 thesis to The use of genitive initial sentences for the specification of quantity in Russian. These are what Babby has dubbed Dick-House-type sentences, where a noun being quantified is placed at the beginning while its quantifier is further to the right. A favorite example has been:

(1) Knig on napisaldve.
booksGEN.PL he wrote two
'Of books, he wrote two.'

Ñ which at the moment holds true of Leonard: he has published Transformational Grammar of Russian Adjectives (1975) and Existential Sentences and Negation in Russian (1980). A third book is now heralded, The Morpholexical Foundations of Russian Syntax, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Today, mainstream linguistics has become more hospitable to data from Slavic languages, thanks in large part to LeonardÕs courageous persistence. Besides Cornell and Princeton, several linguistics programs in this country and abroad have been training speakers of Slavic languages in linguistic theory. Besides the older journals in our two fields, we now have JSL and the FASL conferences. There is renewed interest in areas which Len pioneered, such as the interface of syntax and discourse, of word order and rich morphology, of syntax and lexical storage, syntax and inflection. Len's students have their own lists of favorites among his works one of his more frequently mentioned "greatest hits" is the 1989 article on "Subjectlessness," which showed the incompatibility of the structure-preserving constraint and the EPP, which made it impossible to account for certain impersonal sentences (the notorious tonit type); more importantly, that paper (which had to be published in Serbia, being against established dogma) led to a bolder look at all impersonals, not just those that could not be forced into a theoretical Procrustean bed. Today, many of the theoretical obstacles that Len battled have been cleared away, among them X-bar theory and structure-preserving, while the Slavic challenges to EPP are now reinforced by data from other languages.

In his dual role at Princeton, of Professor of Slavic Linguistics and now Chair of Linguistics as well, Len must be justly proud of his achievements and his students. He can now look forward to a new era where the development of linguistic theory will be more deeply informed by Slavic languages, and by his own work on Slavic syntax.