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Take Note!

Slate of Candidates for 2012

The Nominating Committee has submitted the following slate of members to stand for election in September-November 2011:

Vice President/President-Elect:
Executive Committee (2 at-large seats):

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

To cast your vote for the Slate of Candidates, log into the LSA website by entering your e-mail address and password in the boxes at the upper right of the LSA home page, then scroll down until you see the link to vote in the "Ballots and Surveys" section. If you are already logged in, click on the "My Homepage" link at the top of the screen and scroll down as described previously.

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):

Ellen Kaisse (Washington)

Ellen Kaisse (Ph.D. Harvard 1977) has been a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington since 1976. She has co-edited the journal Phonology since 1988 (with Colin Ewen), previously serving as its American editor (1984-1988). She has also served as divisional dean of Arts and Humanities at Washington. She conducts research in the phonology of Modern Greek, Argentinian Spanish, and Turkish. Dr. Kaisse is the author the book Connected Speech: the interaction of syntax and phonology, joint editor of three volumes, including Studies in lexical phonology (with Sharon Hargus), and the author of numerous articles. Recent publications include two papers in the Blackwell Companion to Phonology (2011): 'Stricture features' and 'The lexical syndrome' (with April McMahon), 'Sympathy meets Argentinian Spanish' (2009) in The nature of the word: studies in honor of Paul Kiparsky and 'Word formation and phonology' (2005) in The Handbook of Word-formation. Her most current research (with Richard Wright) asks whether the sonority sequencing principle is epiphenomenal; she is also interested in the proper description of Vowel Harmony in Anatolian Greek, Northwestern Spanish, and Standard Turkish (with Susannah Levi). Her service to the LSA includes a term on the Executive Committee (2004-2007), and extended editorial duties for Language (Associate Editor, 1984-1987; Review Board, 1988-1990); she co-organized a 2007 LSA plenary panel on the state of phonology, chaired the Language and the Public committee in 2006, and served on the subcommittee on publications in 2010.

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

Kristin Denham (Western Washington University)

Kristin Denham is Professor of Linguistics at Western Washington University, where she has taught since 1996 in both the English Department and the interdepartmental Linguistics Program. She 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. Kristin's recent work focuses on the integration of linguistics into K-12 education and teacher preparation. Her books include Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction (co-author, 2010), 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). Kristin 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 (Babine-Witsuwit'en) and Salish (Lushootseed) languages.

Kristin 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 six, and remains an active participant on this committee. She also 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 I believe there is a great deal more that can be done to educate the public about what the LSA does and about how language works.

The advances of linguistics have remained largely confined to the academy. Given the relative youth of our field, this is not surprising. But we must make better progress on the integration of linguistics into other social institutions&emdash;not just education, but industry, public policy, the media, and the like. As linguistics and LSA members, we can and should work to dispel the myths about language and to combat discrimination based on language. One way we do this already, of course, is through our linguistics courses at colleges and universities. Another important group that we must engage is the students and teachers in K-12 schools.

Although some teacher education programs include linguistics courses, linguistics is not comprehensively integrated into teacher education and is thus absent in the typical K-12 curriculum. To effect change in K-12 education, we must have discussions with K-12 teachers and administrators, and also work with policy makers like the Department of Education to promote the integration of linguistic knowledge into national standards. Also, we should work to expand existing collaborative efforts between the LSA and professional associations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as professional organizations connected to teacher preparation, including the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council for the Social Studies, and the National Science Teachers Association.

The LSA's Language in the School Curriculum Committee (LiSC) certainly plays an important role in facilitating the integration of linguistics into K-12 education and thus the public eye, but we must expand our reach in other ways. Better coordination between the LiSC, the Public Relations, and the Linguistics in Higher Education Committees, for example, could lead to collaborative efforts to better inform the public about the importance of language study, and about the harmful effects of ignorance, such as laws that eliminate linguistic diversity in education, linguistic profiling by police, or mislabeling of dialects as language disorders.

In order to encourage our members to conduct such outreach and service, however, the LSA needs to help such work be recognized for hiring, tenure, and promotion. LSA could also consider holding more sessions at the annual meetings on topics that demonstrate ways to broaden our disciplinary tent, thus validating such community-based service and research. LSA can also help increase the breadth of preparation of graduate and undergraduate linguistics students to include more contact with the public via a variety of channels&emdash;not only K-12 education, but also educational policy-making, journalism, and community outreach&emdash;and to help facilitate connections to organizations outside academia.

Susan Fischer (University of California San Diego)

Susan Fischer is currently affiliated with the Center for Research on Language at UCSD, having most recently been at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has also held visiting positions at Kanda University of International Studies in Japan, National Chung Cheng University (Taiwan), the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, the Salk Institute, and the University of Hawaii. She received her degree at MIT, working under Ken Hale and Merrill Garrett in developmental psycholinguistics. The bulk of her career since has concentrated on sign languages. In addition to publications on sign language structure, processing, history, and variation, she organized the first [of now 10] "Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research" conference in 1986. Recent research has focused on comparisons of Western and Asian sign languages at the morphosyntactic and phonological levels.

Fischer has been active within the LSA, serving on COSWL, the Ethics Committee, the now-defunct Language Review Committee, the Nominating Committee, and a search committee to choose a new editor for Language; of these, she chaired COSWL, Language Review, and Nominating. She has been an outside referee for Language and reviewed abstracts for the winter LSA meeting; she also taught at the 1977, 1982, and 1986 LSA summer linguistics institutes, as well as short courses in the Netherlands, Czech Republic, China, and Brazil. In ancillary service, she is on the Ask-a-Linguist panel and the LinguistList advisory board, has served on several journal editorial boards, and has reviewed abstracts and papers for a variety of journals, conferences, and granting agencies.

Statement

I see the Executive Committee as balancing continuity with innovation. A number of initiatives introduced in the last few years have shown great promise, and I would like to see them continue. Specifically, I am impressed with the increased visibility of linguistics and the LSA in mainstream media; the emphasis on the preservation and revitalization of endangered languages has grown as a theme that also interests the general population. The greater reliance on electronic media and communication has been a time- and money-saver for the organization. These are examples of programs that the organization could and should expand, extend, and improve upon.

One area on which I would like to see more focus in the future is the supply of and demand for linguists. Especially in today's straitened economic climate, universities are still churning out Ph.D.s like there's no tomorrow, and in fact there is no tomorrow for many within traditional academic environments. Either we reduce the flow of new graduates or, as responsible linguistic adults, or we need to actively search out new opportunities for graduates, especially in nontraditional settings. The CUNY efforts on Linguistic Enterprises of a number of years ago were a great start, but those efforts have been neglected if not abandoned. As a next step, I would suggest the initiation of a database that could track where linguists are currently working and where career opportunities are likely to occur in the near future, whether we're talking about designing fonts for endangered languages, improving search engines, building GPS systems that don't sound as if they're admonishing us when we make a wrong turn, consulting on online language instruction, or making up alien languages.

A second area on which I would like to see greater emphasis is membership recruiting and retention, which we all know is crucial to the continued viability of the organization. I've listened to enough Secretary-Treasurer's reports at enough business meetings to have an appreciation for the importance of keeping up membership numbers. Here too there have been some great efforts such as the student mixers at LSA meetings and the renewed summer meetings, as well as newer membership categories for unemployed and underemployed linguists. In addition to attracting new student members, I am also concerned about those past members who have let their membership lapse. Why have they left, and what do we need to do to lure them back into the organization? Here again I would suggest a data-gathering initiative, as well as direct contact by members of the Executive Committee with lapsed colleagues whom they know. Is the problem that meetings and the journal do not represent people's interests? Is there more competition for limited resources? We need quantitative and qualitative data on these questions, but also need to do personal lobbying.

Lisa Green (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Lisa Green received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, her M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky, and her B.S. in English Education from Grambling State University. She is professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research and teaching interests include syntax, syntactic variation, child language acquisition and development of African American English, and linguistics and education. She is the author of African American English: A Linguistic Introduction and Language and the African American Child (Cambridge University Press) and journal articles and book chapters on syntax and semantics of African American English. Her work also addresses the practical applications of the linguistic description of African American English in educational contexts and methods that can be used to help students develop a broader awareness of language and language use.

Green is the founding director of the Center for the Study of African American Language at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Its goal is to foster and integrate research on language in the African American community and applications of that research in educational, social, and cultural realms. The Center has a commitment to serving as a resource for communities, providing research experiences for undergraduates who are interested in the linguistic description of English dialects, and consulting educators who address dialect-related issues. Green has served as chair of the LSA's Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics, and she is currently co-chair of the Committee on Linguistics in Higher Education. She serves on the University of Massachusetts Undergraduate Council and other University and departmental committees. Green also works with the ABC Reading Program in Lake Arthur, Louisiana.

Statement

As colleges and universities place emphasis on general education and integrative learning experiences, more undergraduates will enroll in various linguistics courses in which they will have the opportunity to think about ways in which linguistics is linked to their real world experiences. Given the general education requirements and the broad appeal that courses fulfilling these requirement have, more and more students in these courses will be from underrepresented minority groups who will find working in language-related fields appealing given the possible links between such work and community outreach. It will be possible for students to engage in projects and structured learning that make connections between academic experiences in linguistics and community outreach, for example. In making these connections, students will be in a position to give serious consideration to extending academic knowledge to areas of practical application with specific focus on issues that affect their communities, such as the achievement gap and challenges for academic success.

Over the years, some connections have been made between linguistics and education, especially in discussions about the validity of non-standard language varieties and the possible effects that their use might have in mainstream contexts, such as academia and the marketplace. While integration between linguistics and education has been limited, the discussions between the two disciplines have sparked some interesting questions and debates and have been mainly responsible for part of the body of research on regional and social dialects.

Given the body of research in linguistics on the interaction between language and social factors, systematic variation, and language change, there is an endless possibility of different types of engaging general education courses in linguistics that introduce students to language use in different contexts and help to explain how political and socio-economic factors have influenced linguistic patterns of dialects and non-standard varieties. Considerable emphasis must also be placed on the fact that, while these language varieties and non-standard dialects are often seen as being inextricably linked to culture and society, they are also native varieties of many speakers and should not only be characterized as principled and systematic, but they should be explained and presented as whole systems that young children acquire, not as fragmented anomalies.

The integrative learning experience offers a number of opportunities and interesting challenges for linguistics. On one level, more work needs to be done to integrate different approaches in core areas of linguistics into the study of language varieties that would help to present them as whole systems rather than marginalized fragments often on the periphery of studies in general linguistics. The LSA can serve as a model and resource for such integration by providing more opportunities for research on language varieties and dialects to be present in core activities and presentations at annual meetings. Such integration would also increase the presence of participants from diverse language communities at annual meetings and broaden the discourse and discussions from a number of different perspectives.

Sonja Lanehart (University of Texas at San Antonio)

Sonja L. Lanehart is Professor and Brackenridge Endowed Chair in Literature and the Humanities at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language and literacy in African American communities, language and identity, and the educational implications of sociolinguistic research. Besides numerous articles, she is author of Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy (Texas, 2002), editor of Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English (John Benjamins, 2001) and African American Women's Language: Discourse, Education, and Identity (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of African American Language (expected 2013). She has organized several conferences, including African American Language I and II, and New Ways of Analyzing Variation 27 and 39. A Life Member of the LSA, she has been active in its work for several years, as chair of the Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics, and as a member of the Language in the School Curriculum committee, and the Linguistics in Higher Education Committee. She also convenes the LSA African American Languages Special Interest Group.

Her primary reasons for wanting to participate in LSA at the Executive Committee level are to:

  1. Increase the ethnic and gender diversity of students and faculty in all areas of Linguistics and language research, hence her employment at a federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution.

  2. Mentor and train emerging scholars, hence her involvement in several formal and informal mentoring programs across the US and at her institution. For example, as co-editor of Educational Research: Research News and Comment (2003-2006), the journal that goes out 9 times each year to all 22,000+ American Educational Research Association members, she created a Graduate Student Advisory Board that got experience in all aspects of the peer review process. More LSA members and all scholars need to be involved in mentoring emerging scholars at their own campuses as well as through LSA.

  3. Disseminate and integrate Linguistics with P-16 education of teachers, students, families, and communities. LSA has made great strides in this area with LiHE and LiSC, but we can do more.

  4. Improve the technology and website of LSA. Though strides have been made with the Technology Advisory Committee and its predecessors, more improvements are needed for better communication and better exploiting technology as a tool.

  5. Broaden the LSA program and membership through inclusion of differing methods, methodologies, disciplines involving language research, disciplines that are more praxis oriented, and interdisciplinary research. As the premier Linguistic annual meeting, LSA needs to be more inclusive.

  6. Enhance the structure of LSA and the annual meeting formats to better support changes in LSA membership and the growing needs of its members at all levels&emdash;senior faculty, emerging scholars, private sector workers, and undergraduate students&emdash;based on her experiences at LSA, other conferences, and as an organizer of past conferences.

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