For me the adventure began just 50 years ago, here at MIT in 1961. The Chomskian revolution had just begun, and Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle had just opened up a PhD program in Linguistics, and I came in the first class. I want to start by thanking Chomsky and Halle for building that program, and I thank MIT and the Research Laboratory of Electronics for supporting it. I’m indebted to Chomsky for revolutionizing the field of linguistics and making it into a field whose excitement has never waned. Chomsky redefined linguistics as the study of human linguistic competence, making linguistics one of the early pillars of cognitive science.