It is with great sadness that we pass on to the community the news of the death of our colleague Professor Ronnie Cann.
Ronnie was an important member of the linguistics community in the UK and beyond. His 1984 DPhil from Sussex gave a formal syntax and semantics of a fragment of fifth century Attic Greek, using the then new and exciting linguistic theory of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. This is just an early indication of Ronnie’s erudition, his interest in and command of formalism, and his willingness to break with tradition and established frameworks whenever he felt it was scientifically motivated. Ronnie continued to work on formal syntax and semantics, including writing a 1993 textbook on Formal Semantics for CUP that quickly became a standard text, but his focus shifted to developing the framework of Dynamic Syntax in collaboration with Ruth Kempson, with whom—among other collaborators—he conducted pioneering research, publishing a number of articles as well as the books The Dynamics of Language (Cann, Kempson, Marten, 2005) and Semantics: an introduction to meaning in language (Cann, Kempson, Gregoromichelaki, 2009). At the same time, Ronnie devoted enormous amounts of energy and thought to building up the linguistics community around him. He was an extremely important actor in developing linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, where he was for many years the head of department of Linguistics and later the head of the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, as well as taking on other senior roles at the university. He also held the post of treasurer of LAGB. But perhaps his greatest contribution was as a teacher and supervisor. Ronnie taught courses throughout the curriculum at Edinburgh, and is remembered by his students for challenging them from the beginning (Dowty’s Introduction to Montague semantics for third year undergraduates! If you know, you know) as well as for lacing his lectures with scurrilous quotations from Latin and Greek. He taught at ESSLI, and at Edinburgh he supervised many Masters and PhD students throughout his career, including during his time as Emeritus—during which time he also continued his research on Dynamic Syntax. He put in tremendous amounts of time and energy to supervising his many students. He respected his student’s’ autonomy and recognised their potential, always expecting—and eliciting—work of high standard but providing support just when needed. In the words of one ex-student, “he managed to be an authentic critic and offer real encouragement in just the right balance. Consequently, you felt it really meant something if he took your ideas seriously but it was never an unpleasant experience even when things weren’t going so well.” Ronnie was an inspiring academic, teacher, gardener, and friend. He will be sorely missed.