Henk van Riemsdijk served as an advisory member for the GLOW board for over 30 years and stepped back from this role last year. We are immensly grateful for his help and advice over the years! Thank you so much, Henk!
The current GLOW president, Susi Wurmbrand, has put together a tribute for Henk to show the world how many linguists and linguistic careers he has influenced over the last decades.
The tribute can be found HERE.
Henk has been some kind of self-appointed surrogate father of Hungarian generative linguistics. Ever since the mid-1980’s he has found every opportunity to help young and upcoming students, landing them grants to study at Dutch universities, publishing their work and keeping in touch with them throughout the years following their departure from the Netherlands. Some of them have left the profession, but most of them are still doing valuable work in the field. His efforts were acknowledged on two public ceremonial occasionsin Hungary: he was promoted doctor honoris causa at the University of Szeged in 2012, and GLOW 41 in Budapest in 2018 was held in his honor:
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I met Henk only a few times but for some reason, I remember each meeting well. I had “seen” Henk in a conference in Europe in 1998 but met him formally (Norbert was kind enough to introduce me to him) in 1999 in Tilburg, when I was a post-doc at Leipzig GK. It was the next year, in 2000, when we met again in Cortona where he took some of us out for dinner at a restaurant with stone walls, very bright white lights and white tables, and of course great wine and food. In between, we had exchanged emails, had a telephone conversation and a meeting, in connection with a Dutch funded project on scrambling that Norbert was applying for, with me as a co-PI. On each occasion, he was kind enough to listen to my proposals and suggest generously ways to modify them. Ever since I came back to India in 2001, I have been wanting to get him to our Summer School in the Himalayan mountains (LISSIM) — it hasn’t worked out yet, but I hope it does, soon.