Hans Henrich Hock In memoriam Alice Davison and James W. Gair https://doi.org/10.1515/jsall-2017-0019 In late 2016 and early 2017, within the short period of four months, the South Asian linguistic community lost two of our most productive scholars and solid friends – James W. Gair (10 December 2016) and Alice Davison (3 March 2017). A panel in their memory, “Perspectives on South Asian Syntax”, will be held at the 2017 South Asia Conference at Madison, Wisconsin, with contributions by E. Annamalai, Rakesh Bhatt, Benjamin Slade, and me. A more extensive session celebrating Jim’s and Alice’s work, organized by Rajesh Bhatt, Veneeta Dayal, and Anoop Mahajan, is being planned for the 2018 SALA meeting in Konstanz, Germany. Alice Davison’s life and work were memorialized at her home institution, the University of Iowa, on 1 April. A celebration of Jim Gair’s life, arranged by his wife, Barbara Lust, was held on 17 June in Trumansburg, New York. At this occasion I would like to say just a few words to remember our friends and their contributions to our field. James W. Gair (1927–2016), “Jim”, is well known for his work on Sinhala and its close relative, Dhivehi, on Tamil/ Malayalam (especially the Sri Lankan variety of Tamil), and on the interactions between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian in the south of the South Asian convergence area. Much of his work in this area has focused on issues of syntax, as well as complexities in contact interaction that challenge the com- mon perception that all structural similarities between Dravidian and (Insular) Indo-Aryan can be attributed to substratum influence by Dravidian. Like other linguists of his generation, Jim made important contributions to the development of language teaching materials, both on Hans Henrich Hock, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA, E-mail: hhhock@illinois.edu Presented at the 2017 SALA Roundtable in Poznań, Poland, and updated 25 May 2017. JSALL 2017; 4(2): 357–360 Brought to you by | University of Gothenburg Authenticated Download Date | 11/8/17 11:23 PM