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LSA Bulletin
 No. 192 June 2006

Slate of Candidates for 2007

At its January 2006 meeting, the Executive Committee nominated Gregory Ward (Northwestern U) to serve as Secretary-Treasurer and Brian Joseph (OH SU) to serve as Editor. The Nominating Committee (Louis Goldstein, chair; Barbara Abbott; Judith Aissen; Mark Aronoff; Greg Carlson; Sharon Inkelas; and Shana Poplack) submits the following slate of members to stand for election in August 2006: Vice President/President-Elect: Ellen Prince (U Penn); for Executive Committee: Jennifer Cole (U IL-Urbana/Champaign), Donka Farcas (UC-Santa Cruz), Shigeru Miwagawa (MIT), and Thomas Wasow (Stanford U).

If ten or more members separately and in writing nominate any additional personal member for any position by 1 July 2006, that name will be added to the ballots submitted to the members. Nominations should be sent to: Nominating Cte, LSA, 1325 18 St, NW, Ste 211, Washington, DC 20036-6501.

Bios and Statements:

Jennifer Cole (BA/MA, U MI, 1983/1984; PhD, MIT, 1987) has been a faculty member in linguistics, cognitive science, and computer science at U IL-Urbana/Champaign since 1990. Dr. Cole's research is published in the Journal of Phonetics, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Memory and Language, Revista Linguistica, encyclopedias of language and linguistics (Elsevier, Routledge, and Wilson), and the Garland Press Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series. She is also the editor of four books. Dr. Cole has served on the editorial boards of the journals Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and Phonology, and chaired the 9th Conference on Laboratory Phonology. Cole's research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, NASA, Motorola, Dept. of Education, and the National Security Education Program, and she was an IBM Graduate Student Fellow, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and an Ida M. Green Scholar (MIT). She is a member of the Linguistic Society of America, the Acoustical Society of America, the International Speech Communication Association, the International Phonetic Society, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Dr. Cole's research is in the areas of phonology and phonetics. At U IL-Urbana/Champaign, Dr. Cole has served on the General Education Board and the Undergraduate Honors Council to promote education in language and linguistics.

STATEMENT
Dr. Cole believes that linguistics is critical to advances in social science and technology, and that linguistic understanding should be applied in the planning of social, political, and economic development. To broaden and strengthen the impact of linguistics in the academy and beyond, Dr. Cole identifies three priorities for the LSA:

Donka Farkas (PhD, U Chicago, 1981) is professor of linguistics at UC-Santa Cruz, where she has taught since 1991. Previously, she held teaching positions at Yale U and PA SU. She has participated at several ESSLLI events over the years and has taught at Paris 7 and the Linguistics Institute in Budapest, Hungary. She served as Graduate Program Director at UC-Santa Cruz from 2003-2006. Her research is primarily in the areas of semantics and pragmatics, which she approaches through close empirical analysis of data from Hungarian, Romanian, and French. Recurrent themes are nominal semantics and the semantics of verbal mood. Recent publications include The semantics of incorporation, with H. de Swart (2003), and papers on specificity, (in)definiteness, scope, and determiner semantics from a cross-linguistic perspective. She has served on the Board of Directors of a local elementary school.

STATEMENT
As a member of the LSA Executive Committee I would be interested in (and qualified for) developing ties between the LSA and linguistic societies and communities elsewhere in the world. Another area of special interest is the presence of linguistics in elementary and high schools in the US. Finally, my experience as a mentor (for both graduate students and junior colleagues) makes me particularly sensitive to both the needs and the potential of junior colleagues.

Brian Joseph (PhD, Harvard U, 1978) is currently Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Linguistics at OH SU, where he has taught since 1979, serving as department chair 1987-97. His primary specialization is in historical linguistics, especially pertaining to Greek, the Balkan languages, and Indo-European. He is author or co-author of 5 books and over 175 articles and editor or co-editor of 9 volumes. He has served the LSA in various capacities: Associate Editor of Language (1988-90, 1995-97), director of the 1993 Linguistic Institute, member of the Linguistic Institute Fellowships Committee (1995), member of the Nominating Committee (1996-98, chair in 1998), consultant to the Program Committee, and frequent presenter at LSA meetings. In addition, he has taught at four LSA Linguistic Institutes (1991, 1993, 1999, and 2003). He has been Executive Editor of Diachronica and is a founding editor of the Journal of Greek Linguistics.

STATEMENT
I am now in my fifth year as editor of Language and trust that the continued success of the journal is reason enough for the LSA membership to allow me to continue. I have striven in these 5 years to bring out excellent articles on varied topics of interest to a wide readership, to maintain the high standards of quality that have characterized Language over the years, and to expand the degree of "interactiveness" between readers and the material in the journal by creating a "Letters to Language" department, recognizing an expanded role for "Discussion Notes", and offering readers a closer look at the editorial process and my thoughts on the journal and our field through my use of the Editor's Department.

Shigeru Miyagawa (PhD, U AZ, 1980) has been at MIT since 1991, where he is professor of linguistics and holds the chair, Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture. Prior to MIT, he was the head of East Asian Languages and Literatures at OH SU. He was an Associate Editor of Language, 2000-2003. He taught at the 2005 LSA Summer Institute. Aside from Language, he has been on the editorial boards of Linguistic Inquiry, Syntax, the Journal of East Asian Linguistics, and the Journal of Japanese Linguistics. He has chaired two international conferences, Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (with Jaklin Kornfilt) and Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics. His publications include several books/monographs and over 40 articles. Along with linguistics, he works on interactive educational projects. StarFestival, which looks at issues of growing up in a bilingual, bicultural environment, was awarded the Best of Show at the 1997 MacWorld Exposition. Visualizing Cultures, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize historian John W. Dower, has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as an outstanding humanities educational website.

STATEMENT
LSA should become more international. LSA must reach out to other parts of the world in ways it has never done before to seek membership and encourage intellectual cooperation. LSA used to be the most important organization for linguists not only from the US but also from other parts of the world. But circumstances have changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In Asia, for example, there are important national linguistic organizations in India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and so forth. Linguists now tend to join only their own national organization. This is a major reason why the membership in LSA has been declining for years. LSA must reach out globally to collaborate with the major linguistic organizations in other countries and to recruit more international members to participate in the life of the LSA.

Ellen F. Prince (BA/MA French, Brooklyn C, 1964/1967; PhD, linguistics, U Penn, 1974). U Penn Department of Linguistics: assistant professor 1974-79, associate professor 1979-87, professor 1987-2005, chair 1994-97, Professor Emeritus 2005-present. LSA Linguistic Institutes: Visiting scholar: U MA 1974; U IL-Urbana/Champaign 1978; visiting professor: Stanford U 1987 (also Associate Director); Cornell U 1997; U IL-Urbana/Champaign 1999; Heinrich-Heine U (Düsseldorf) 2002 (also Associate Director); MI SU 2003; forum lecturer: Harvard/MIT 2005. Other LSA service: Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics, 1977-78, chair 1978; Steering Committee, Linguistics in the Undergraduate Curriculum Project, 1985-87; Executive Committee, 1992-94; Book Award Committee, 1992-93; Resolutions Committee, 1993; Travel Grants Committee, 1994; Advisory Board on Outreach, 1995-98; Fellowship Committee, 2002. Other visiting professorships: Charles U (Prague) 1997, U Amsterdam 2001. AAAS Section Z: Member-at-large, Section Committee, 1997-2001; Electorate Nominating Committee, 2005-present. Main interests: discourse/pragmatics, esp. discourse functions of syntactic forms, discourse aspects of reference, language contact and change, Yiddish. Representative publications study: (1) focus-presupposition constructions: Language 1978; BLS-7 1981; Journal of Pragmatics 1985; CLS 22 Parasession 1986; Culicover & McNally, eds. 1998; (2) Yiddish: ESCOL '88 (wh-clauses); BLS-16 1990; Guy, Feagan, et al., eds. 1997; Smith, ed. 2001 (relative clauses); Goldberg, Herzog, et al., eds. 1993 (postposed subjects); Bosch & van der Sandt, eds. 1998 (Subject-Prodrop); Birner & Ward, eds. 2006 (impersonal pronouns); (3) given/new information: Cole, ed. 1981; Thompson & Mann, eds. 1992; (4) contact-induced semantic/pragmatic change: Journal of Pragmatics 1988; Schmid, Austin, & Stein, eds. 1998; Smith & Veenstra, eds. 2001; and (5) Centering Theory: Walker, Joshi, & Prince, eds. 1998; Maienborn, Portner, and von Heusinger, eds. To appear.

Gregory Ward (BA, UC-Berkeley, 1978; PhD, U Penn, 1985) is professor of linguistics at Northwestern U, where he has taught since 1986 (and was Chair from 1999-2004). He has also taught at the 1993, 1997, and 2003 LSA Summer Linguistic Institutes, and will be teaching at the upcoming 2007 Institute at Stanford. His primary research area is discourse, with specific interests in pragmatic theory, information structure, intonational meaning, and reference/anaphora. Recent publications have investigated deferred reference, event anaphora (with A. Kehler), and functional compositionality (with B. Birner and J. Kaplan). With B. Birner, he co-authored Information status and noncanonical word order in English (Benjamins, 1998). With B. Birner and R. Huddleston, he is co-author of 'Information Packaging', Chapter 16 of The Cambridge grammar of the English language (2002). With L. Horn, he is co-editor of Blackwell's The handbook of pragmatics (2004), and with B. Birner, he is co-editor of Drawing the boundaries of meaning: Neo-Gricean studies in pragmatics and semantics in honor of Laurence R. Horn (Benjamins, in press). From 1986 to 1998, Ward was a consultant at AT&T Labs - Research, working on intonational meaning. He was co-PI on an NIH grant (1991-1996) to study sentence processing and is currently co-PI (with J. Hirschberg) on an NSF grant to study dialogue prosody for voice response systems. In 2004-05, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Ward's LSA service includes a term on the LSA Executive Committee (1997-1999) and three years as Secretary-Treasurer (2004-2006). Among his current LSA projects is the development of new and expanded electronic products and services for members.

Tom Wasow has taught at Stanford U since 1974, where he is now professor of linguistics and philosophy. He has also taught at Hampshire C (1972-73) and at LSA Institutes in 1974, 1979, 1987, and 2005. He has held several major administrative roles at Stanford: Chair of Linguistics (1 year), Associate Director and Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information (2 years), Dean of Undergraduate Studies (4 years), Associate Dean of Graduate Policy (4 years), Director of the Symbolic Systems Program (12 years), Chair of the Faculty Senate (1 year). He has served on the LSA Advisory Committee to Programs (3 years); LSA Undergraduate Program Advisory Committee (3 years, 1 as chair). He is co-author/editor, with Geoffrey Nunberg, of "The Domain of Linguistics" for the LSA web site. He is currently Associate Editor of both Language and Cognitive Science and has been member of many program committees and editorial boards over the years. His research areas are syntactic theory, psycholinguistics, variation in English, and philosophy of linguistics.

STATEMENT
Two aspects of linguistics that I found particularly appealing when I entered the field almost 40 years ago were: (1) its attempts to characterize an aspect of human nature precisely and explicitly and (2) its many points of contact with neighboring disciplines, especially philosophy and psychology. During the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, both of these features diminished considerably as work in the mainstream of theoretical linguistics became increasingly vague and programmatic, with ever fewer links to work in other fields. In the past few years, this situation has changed. The development of new technologies for studying language has facilitated the creation of novel methods for investigating our knowledge and use of language. These include (but are not limited to) corpus searches on a scale previously unimaginable and both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques for studying the millisecond-by-millisecond processes underlying language use. These methods are providing a wealth of new insights into language processing and how it affects structure, and these insights are inevitably influencing linguistic theory. These developments are beginning to revive interest in our field among our colleagues in related departments. I hope the LSA will nurture these exciting trends. The changes the field is undergoing need to be brought to the attention of funding agencies, university administrations, and, ideally, a wider public. The LSA can facilitate this through its publications, web site, and personal contacts of its officers.

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