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Slate of Candidates for 2011

The Nominating Committee has submitted the following slate of members to stand for election in September-November 2010:

Vice President/President-Elect:

• Keren Rice (University of Toronto)

Executive Committee (2 at-large seats):

• Kristin Denham (Western Washington University)
• Andrew Garrett (University of California, Berkeley)
• Mark Liberman (University of Pennsylvania)
• Joyce McDonough (University of Rochester)

For the LSA guidelines on committee nominations, please see the LSA Constitution, Article IV.

If ten or more members separately and in writing nominate any additional personal member for any position by 6 July 2010, that name will be added to the ballots submitted to the members. Nominations should be sent to:

Nominating Committee, Linguistic Society of America
1325 18th St NW
Suite 211
Washington, DC 20036-6501.

Online voting in the annual LSA elections will begin 1 September and will close on 6 November.

A brief biographical summary and statement for each candidate is included below.

Biographical Summaries and Statements

Candidate for Vice President/President-Elect (1-year term, with two additional years on the Executive Committee as President and Past President):

Keren Rice (University of Toronto)

Keren Rice (Ph.D., University of Toronto 1976) is University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Linguistics and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a member of the President's Teaching Academy. She was founding director of the undergraduate program in Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto, and served as its director for almost 15 years; she also was founding director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives, a research centre at the University of Toronto.

Prof. Rice studies the Dene (Slavey) language of Canada's Northwest Territories. She has helped produce a dictionary as well as a grammar of the language. She was a member of a committee that worked to standardize the writing system of the language. She has worked with members of the Dene community on developing language curriculum and materials and has been involved with training language teachers. She has made scholarly contributions on Dene and other languages of the Athapaskan family as well as in phonology generally.

In 1992 she was awarded the first Bloomfield Book Award from the LSA for A Grammar of Slave. The University of Toronto has recognized her with the award of a Killam Research Fellowship in 1993 and 1994; a Connaught Research Leave Fellowship in 2001-2002; and a President's Teaching Award in 2006, and she was recognized in an Honour Ceremony at First Nations House at the University of Toronto in 2005. Her books includes Hare Noun Dictionary; the co-edited Athapaskan Linguistics: Current Perspectives on a Language Family (with Eung-Do Cook); Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope: Word Formation in the Athapaskan Verb, the co-edited Athabaskan Prosody (with Sharon Hargus), and the co-edited Contrast in Phonology: Theory, Perception, Acquisition (with Peter Avery and Elan Dresher). She is editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics and serves on several editorial boards. She was a member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Board from 2002 until 2008, and she currently chairs a SSHRC committee on ethics. She served as vice president and president-elect, president, and past president of the Canadian Linguistic Association from 1996 to 2002 and was elected a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 2005. She has served on LSA committees, including a term on the Executive Committee and a term on the Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation. She currently is co-chair of the Program Committee.

Candidates for 2 At-Large Seats on the Executive Committee (3-year term):

Kristin Denham (Western Washington University)

Kristin Denham received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Washington, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Arizona, and her B.A. in Linguistics and French from Swarthmore College. She has been teaching in the English Department and the Linguistics Program at Western Washington University since 1996.

Her books include Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction (co-author, 2010) (which was nominated for the LSA's Leonard Bloomfield award), Linguistics at School: Language Awareness in Primary and Secondary Education (co-editor, 2010), Language in the Schools: Integrating Linguistics into K-12 Education (co-editor, 2005), and has published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Language and Linguistics Compass. Her work in syntax focuses on optional wh-movement, and she has conducted fieldwork on Athabaskan and Salish languages.

She has served as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, Cambridge University Press, Blackwell's Compass, and Routledge, among others. From 2003-06, she served as the editor of Syntax in the Schools, the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar, and she continues to work with both NCTE's Commission on Language and LSA (via the Language in the School Curriculum Committee) on collaborative approaches to more linguistically-informed approaches to language in K-12 schools. She and Anne Lobeck received a grant from the NSF for work on the integration of linguistics into K-12 education.

Kristin has served as chair of the LSA's Language in the School Curriculum Committee, has organized and chaired four LSA organized sessions, participated in five, and remains an active participant on this committee.

She serves on her University's Faculty Senate, and has served on the Faculty Affairs Council, the Academic Honesty Board, the Tenure and Promotion Committee, and numerous other departmental committees.

Statement

The LSA has significantly improved its interaction with the public over the last few years, but there is a great deal more that can be done in this arena. We need to continue to dispel the myths and the misinformation about language that the vast majority of people have, and to work tirelessly to combat discrimination based on language. I believe that one of the best ways to do this is via the teachers and the students in K-12 schools. Work by the LSA's Language in the School Curriculum Committee is certainly an important piece of the project, but we must expand our reach in other ways.

The advances of linguistics have remained largely confined to the academy, and though this lack of knowledge is unfortunate, it is not surprising. Although some teacher education programs include courses on linguistics, linguistics is not comprehensively integrated into teacher education, and is thus largely absent in the K-12 curriculum. Linguists cannot take on this task alone, of course; we need to work with non-linguists as collaborators. We should reach out not only to K-12 teachers and administrators, but also to those on standards boards, community organizations, and the like.

The LSA needs to help ensure that such collaboration with non-linguists and other sorts of community outreach is recognized as important for tenure and promotion. One way to directly help with such broadening of our disciplinary tent is to have more sessions at LSA on topics that demonstrate the kinds of outreach that is possible, thus encouraging linguists just beginning their careers to get involved in such "public relations" work. LSA can also help increase the breadth of preparation of graduate and undergraduate linguistics students into areas in which there is more contact with the public - not only K-12 education, but also educational policy, journalism, and community outreach.

Also, better coordination between the LSA's Language in the School Curriculum and the Public Relations committees could lead to some collaborative efforts to better inform the public about the importance of language study, and the effects of lack of such knowledge.

Andrew Garrett (University of California, Berkeley)

Andrew Garrett (Ph.D. Harvard 1990) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1995. He also taught at the University of Texas at Austin and in visiting gigs at Stanford and three Linguistic Institutes (1997, 2005, 2009). At Berkeley, he directs the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, which supports Native American language documentation (especially in the western US) and houses one of the major US indigenous language archives (including paper and audio materials, in analog and digital formats). In that role he is committed to improving the accessibility and usability of language archives for university-based and heritage-community researchers.

Garrett's research area is historical linguistics, primarily in Indo-European and American Indian linguistics; he is interested in elucidating mechanisms of change (in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) and reconstructing language phylogeny and prehistory. His articles have appeared in Language, IJAL, Ériu, Historische Sprachforschung (KZ), Die Sprache, and other journals and edited volumes. Within Indo-European he has published mainly on Anatolian languages such as Hittite (and also on Armenian, English, Greek, and Irish) and on the diversification of Indo-European as a whole. As an Americanist he has done fieldwork on Hupa, Karuk, Northern Paiute, Northern Sierra Miwok, and Yurok, and has published on Numic and Yurok; his research integrates new language documentation and the extensive archival record assembled by earlier scholarly generations. Garrett directs a collaborative project on Yurok (Algic, northwestern California) that includes a web-based audio, text, and lexical database that may be the largest of its kind for any non-literary language. He has received two NSF-NEH language documentation grants: a 2001 NSF grant for Yurok language documentation; and a 2007 NEH DEL grant to improve the content descriptions and accessibility of Berkeley's indigenous language archives. Random honors: Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley, 2007; Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, 2009. Past LSA service: Associate Editor of Language; Web Advisory Committee; Linguistic Institute and Fellowships Committee; Director, 2009 Linguistic Institute.

Statement

At each of the four wonderful Linguistics departments I've had the privilege to be affiliated with (Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, Texas), I learned that our department is distinguished from some (unnamed) others by its rigorously empirical commitment to linguistic generalizations that are grounded in data. I've come to believe that the Others do not exist after all, even if we sometimes need to imagine them, and that we're all playing on at least adjoining fields. But the methodologies through which we ground ourselves are very different. If anything, they are becoming even more diverse with our discipline's current transformations: the increasing precision and sophistication of psychological models have renewed experimental work and strengthened our links with cognitive science; engagement with the linguistic effects of globalization has revitalized field practice and given it a new social urgency; statistical methods have given new force to the study of language in society, and computational tools have enabled a very different kind of corpus philology. As the field expands, it is hard for linguists to maintain the breadth needed to confront the whole language inevitably confronted in fieldwork or text corpora. I therefore hope to ensure that Linguistic Institutes, LSA meetings, (snail and e-)Language, and other LSA operations will serve the goal of broadly educating linguists in the face of increasing specialization.

I am also committed to a view of linguistics that emphasizes grammatical structures, the traditional object of structuralist and generativist inquiry, as well as the contexts (demographic, historical, and psychological, among others) in which they are embedded. An insistence on context is probably also necessary to rescue us from occasional solipsism. In many colleges and universities, the anthropology and foreign language departments that were historically allies and even creators of Linguistics departments have been shedding linguists, turning the discipline further in on itself. We need to do a better job of showing allied fields why linguistics is interesting - that the questions we ask are also interesting for them. At Linguistic Institutes, LSA meetings, and elsewhere, I would like to see us find ways to encourage more participation by applied linguists (whose expertise in language learning is crucial for many of us who work on endangered languages), literary historians (e.g. those interested in stylistics or linguistic markers of social networks), and anthropologists, among others.

This goal is partly also the mission of public education. We honor this through our Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award; I would like to see us find more ways to support it. The urgency of our mission is underscored this year by Arizona's execrable new laws that invite linguistic (and ethnic) profiling by the police and that seek to outlaw linguistic diversity in education. I am not optimistic enough to think that the LSA by itself will transform public or legislative opinion, but in areas where we are a key scientific organization we should certainly try to educate lawmakers and the public. Perhaps we should develop more of the contacts that will put our most articulate public speakers on op-ed pages and news programs when needed; in any case the LSA needs to speak out on issues that matter to those interested in language and society.

Mark Liberman (University of Pennsylvania)

Mark Liberman received his PhD in Linguistics from MIT in 1975. His dissertation, The Intonational System of English, was published by Garland, and other early publications include Prosodic form and discourse function, with Ivan Sag; On stress and linguistic rhythm, with Alan Prince;, and Intonational Invariance under Changes in Pitch Range and Length, with Janet Pierrehumbet. He worked on issues in speech and language technology at AT&T Bell Labs from 1975 to 1990, first as a member of technical staff and finally as head of the Linguistics Research Department. In 1978, he was a visiting assistant professor at MIT. Since 1990 has been Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a member of the Department of Computer and Information Science, and of the Psychology Graduate Group. He has served on the LSA's committees on Undergraduate Education and on Public Relations, and on the editorial advisory boards of Cognition, Computer Speech and Language, Speech Communication, and the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. He founded the Linguistic Data Consortium in 1992, and remains its director, and was director of Penn's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science from 2000 to 2005. He is the resident Faculty Master of Ware College House, and the faculty director of College Houses and Academic Services at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the LSA and the AAAS. In 2003, he and Geoff Pullum co-founded the popular language-oriented blog "Language Log", which averages more than half a million page views a month.

Statement

The general public is fascinated, for good reason, by speech, language, and communication. But linguistics is under-represented in public discourse, and in education from kindergarten to graduate school. This lowers the quality of public discourse, including discussions of important public policy issues, while also reducing the number of jobs and the amount of research funding available to linguists.

Several recent developments offer a historic opportunity to improve the standing of our field. The most important of these is the application in research and education of "eScience", defined as the distributed creation and analysis of very large data sets. Fields from astronomy and biology to geology and particle physics have been strongly affected, but no field has more to gain than Linguistics.

As a result of inexpensive networked computation, effective and flexible analysis algorithms, and a growing universe of digital text and speech, we can observe linguistic patterns in space, time, and cultural context on a scale 3-6 orders of magnitude greater than before. Nearly everywhere we point these new observational instruments, we see fascinating regularities that demand explanation.

As the underlying social and technical trends continue, the amount and quality of available data will continue to go up, and the cost of the research will continue to go down. This is an opportunity for leading-edge research, but just as important, it's an opportunity for outreach and education.

At increasing scale and decreasing cost, research of this kind is becoming accessible to undergraduates and even to high-school and elementary-school students. And in the course using these methods to explore the linguistic questions that interest them, students may encounter concepts and skills that range from logic, acoustic physics and computer graphics to exploratory and inferential data analysis.

The same developments open up new possibilities for speech- and language-related research in an extraordinary variety of other fields, from psychology and economics to law and musicology. Researchers in these fields are starting to take advantage of the new opportunities, with or without the participation of linguists.

The LSA can play several important roles in this process. Internal to lingistics, it can mediate a discussion of these opportunities and how we should respond to them. It can help to spread relevant ideas and skills, and to identify and solve problems. Externally, it can work to develop and promote new curricular initiatives, starting at the undergraduate level, and to explore collaborations with other disciplines.

In this as in many other matters, the hard question is how to go beyond committee reports and preaching-to-the-choir workshops. As a relatively small and poor society, the LSA is not rich in resources to bring to bear on questions of this kind. The available tools include the annual meetings, the summer institutes, and the society's publications, and these should be used in an appropriate and judicious way.

In addition, the society's status as representative of the field of Linguistics in the United States is a valuable asset, and there may be opportunities to use this asset more aggressively in establishing fruitful relationships with other organizations and institutions.

Joyce McDonough (University of Rochester)

Joyce McDonough received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1990, after which she did a postdoc with Peter Ladefoged at UCLA working on the Sounds of the Worlds Languages project. She is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Rochester where she has taught since 1997. She holds a secondary appointment in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Joyce is a faculty affiliate of Susan B. Anthony Institute of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Rochester, where she acted as Curriculum Director in 2003-2004. She is also an elected member of the University's Faculty Senate and has served on the Faculty Senate Executive Committee. She is a current member of the University Committee for Tenure and Promotion and is a member of the University Diversity and Leadership task force.

Joyce McDonough's work is in two areas: the documentation of sound and speech patterns in under-documented languages, and in speech production and processing. Her book The Navajo Sound System (Kluwer 2003), for which she won a Bellagio Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, provided a baseline documentation of the sounds of the Navajo language as a compliment to the landmark Young and Morgan grammar The Navajo Language, as a basis for building an understanding of the phonology and morphology of the language. She has held NSF DEL grant to work on the languages in the Mackenzie Basin with colleagues at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She has worked with colleagues in experimental psychology in online speech processing, and with colleagues in the development of analysis tools for ultrasound data. She has served on the CELP and COSWL panels at the LSA and is the contact person for the LSA's Special Interest Group on phonetic fieldwork.

Statement

We are in a time of expansion and growth in the field of linguistics. New technologies have radically changed the way data is collected and analyzed, new and rapidly growing subfields are arising that are encompassing and surpassing the basic contemporary subfields (syntax, semantics phonetics and phonology), primarily in response to larger intellectual, scientific and social concerns that are arising in the culture. These subfields include sociolinguistics and socio-phonetics, computation linguistics, corpora and documentary linguistics, to name a few, all of which have theoretical linguistics as a base. Many departments are experiencing large increases in enrollments in undergraduate classes and majors. Increasing numbers of students are asking for MA programs in fields like computation linguistics and documentary linguistics and fieldwork, sociolinguistics, and in MA programs that provide training in basic theoretical linguistics. The appeal of a quantitative social science closely connected to the human language capacity and tied to biocultural diversity and environmental issues seems to have great appeal to current undergraduate populations.

These changes increase the potential contributions that linguists make to various aspects of the social, scientific, intellectual and political life of this country.

I see four areas where the LSA can work to improve our interface with other disciplines and professional organizations.

1. Publication. As a profession we would be well served by encouraging and increasing participation in non-standard online venues such as eLanguage and PLOS, which are peer-reviewed publications whose goals are to provide open- access platforms to facilitate the exchange of ideas and allow for the integration of digital media into publication. Presently these venues are under-utilized in linguistics. They have the potential both of opening up publication bottlenecks that exist in standard journals and providing a venue for new methodologies and data, and approaches to data not covered in traditional paper journals. Part of this discussion must include education of departmental review committees towards new types of publication venues.

2. The function of linguistics training. Building an open and ongoing venue for discussing how we can and are broadening out what we are training students for, what types of professions and activities linguistics background can provide training in.

3. Development of popular science writing. writing for a broader audience. LSA has produced excellent and articulate pamphlets and publications for the general audience. This is an area an be expanded, a session at the LSA Institute, access points, a website page devoted to a articles and books reviewed.

4. Website support for specialized summer programs which train 1) indigenous people as linguists and language activists to work in their own communities documenting languages, such as ALDI (University of Arizona), CILLDI (University of Alberta), Aboriginal Language Revitalization Program (University of Victoria), NILI (U Oregon), and Master-apprentice programs and 2) programs as InField which teach new methodologies to linguists.

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