2004 Annual Meeting

The 78th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America was held at the Sheraton Boston Hotel, 8-11 January 2004. The American Dialect Society, American Name Society, North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, and the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas met in conjunction with the LSA. There were over 1,200 registered participants.

LSA President Ray Jackendoff officially opened the meeting at 7:15 PM on 8 January immediately preceding the first plenary address:

Good evening. I'm Ray Jackendoff, President of the LSA, and I wanted to start off tonight's proceedings with an official welcome on behalf of the Executive Committee. We have an exciting meeting this year, and I know lots of people are excited about it because we have a record number of people registered for the meeting.

I was just a few minutes ago told something worth mentioning: Barbara Abbott is here attending her 30th consecutive LSA. Can anyone else match that record? (no)

I'm sure you're eager for the plenaries to start, but I just want to put in a little plug for the LSA. Most of you are probably familiar with the LSA in three contexts: It sponsors these annual meetings, it publishes the journal Language, and it sponsors the Linguistic Institute every other summer. Last summer's very successful one was at Michigan State, and the 2005 Institute will be right here, put on by MIT and Harvard in collaboration. These activities all take a tremendous amount of preparation. For example you may be surprised to know that arrangements for the annual meeting in 2009 and the Institute in 2007 are already underway--and that the planning for this meeting began late in the last century. So I'd like to thank especially the Local Arrangements Committee, chaired by Carol Neidle, and the Program Committee, chaired by Bill Idsardi, for the phenomenal amount of work they put into making this happen.

There are other activities of the LSA that perhaps many of you know less about, for example our membership in the Consortium of Social Science Associations, an organization that acts as liaison between the academic research community and the policymaking community in Washington, which determines what kinds of grants there will be for all of us. We are similarly involved in the Coalition for National Science Funding, the National Humanities Alliance, and the American Council of Learned Societies. The LSA is also involved in educational policy, through activities of the Language in the School Curriculum Committee and alliances gradually being forged with the National Council of Teachers of English. A collaboration is underway with the Modern Language Association for a Language Summit, concerned with how we might change the public perception of language.

Through activities of the Advisory to Programs Committee, the LSA has been involved in lobbying on behalf of endangered departments and programs in linguistics in various universities. There is an initiative underway to create a Virtual Museum of Language, an online resource that presents what we know about language to the general public. The LSA has also published a very popular series of pamphlets, FAQs about language for the general public on such topics as "Why do some people have an accent?", "Is English changing?", "What is Sign Language?", "What is Ebonics?", and "Does the language I use influence the way I think?" There are about a dozen of these at the moment with several more in the works.

The people who keep all this running smoothly are the folks at the Secretariat: Executive Director Extraordinaire Maggie Reynolds, Mary Niebuhr, and Sharon Winkler.

What I want to bring to your attention through this list is that the LSA is the institution that represents our profession to the rest of the country. And my plug is: If you aren't already a member, JOIN! And get your friends and colleagues and students--and teachers--to join. It's not only to your benefit but to our whole community, without whom we couldn't have professional lives as individuals.

I want to talk about one more thing and then I'll stop. One of the big issues of the past decade in linguistics has been the status of endangered languages. Now there are several institutions involved in their recording and preservation, including a committee of the LSA but also the Endangered Language Fund in this country and the Endangered Languages Academic Programme in the UK. Since last spring, the LSA Executive Committee has been working on a new initiative, and I am absolutely delighted to be able to announce it tonight. In our discussion of the issues, we felt that many students in linguistics don't have the opportunity to be properly trained in working on endangered languages. We decided to respond to that need by endowing a new chair for the Linguistic Institute, alongside the existing Collitz and Sapir chairs. This chair will be dedicated to the teaching of a field methods course at every Institute henceforth, and it will be named for someone whose passion for the study and preservation of endangered languages is legendary: Ken Hale. I'll have more to say about this chair in the business meeting tomorrow afternoon, but for now, I can say it's only fitting that the first Kenneth Hale Professor will serve at the 2005 Institute at MIT.

Tonight, we're formally launching the public fund drive for the chair. The MIT administration and department have been very generous in pledging for this fund drive. We have also privately approached past presidents of the Society, recent past members of the Executive Committee, and Ken's close colleagues at MIT, who have together given us pledges of about $27,000, about 20 of which are individual pledges of $1000 or more. We will welcome your pledges, starting tonight!

And now, I want to thank you all for your indulgence, and I want to wish you a wonderful time at this great intellectual party this weekend.

The Annual Business Meeting was held 9 January and attended by approximately 70 members. The President called the meeting to order and recognized the presence of a number of past presidents. He announced the start of a campaign to raise funds to endow the Ken Hale Chair to ensure that a course in how to collect data of previously undocumented languages will be taught at each LSA Linguistic Institute. He also noted the upcoming occasion of Past President Murray Emeneau's 100th birthday. The Secretary-Treasurer reported highlights of actions taken by the Executive Committee on 8 January. At the recommendation of the Executive Committee, Society members present elected Probal Dasgupta (U Hyderabad), Inga-Lill Hansson (U Lund), and Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues (U Brasilia) for honorary membership. The citations presented read:

Probal Dasgupta, University of Hyderabad, India. Dean of the School of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics at Hyderabad U, Dasgupta has made major contributions to general, South Asian/Indian, and Esperanto linguistics. His research ranges over a vast variety of topics, including current syntactic theory and comparative syntax, generative phonology and morphology, lexicology, Indo-Aryan linguistics (with focus on Bangla [Bengali]), sociolinguistics (including diglossia and South Asian English), psycholinguistics, and linguistic interfaces with literature and philosophy.

Dasgupta received his PhD in linguistics from NYU in 1980 with a dissertation on Questions and relative and complement clauses in a Bangla grammar and has taught on linguistics faculties at NYU, U Melbourne, U Calcutta, Deccan C Post-Graduate and Research Institute (Pune, India), and since 1989, U Hyderabad, where he is now also Dean of the School of Humanities. He has served as editor of Indian Linguistics, the journal of the Linguistic Society of India (1982-1987), co-editor of Language Problems and Language Planning (John Benjamins, 1990-present), and associate editor of the Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (Sage Publications, now with Mouton de Gruyter, 1998-present). He has provided valuable services to the Indian linguistic community by extension lectures on historical linguistics, the theory of government and binding, and morphology and phonotactics, as well as by supervising PhD dissertations on Indian languages, such as the 2000 thesis by P. Anuradha (A minimalist account of null subjects in Kannada) and the 1995 thesis by Ara Shah (Complement clauses in Hindi and Gujarati). Invited talks in India and abroad include "Michel Foucault and discourse analysis" (Cntl Inst Engl & Indian Langs, Hyderabad), "Minimalism" (U Hyderabad), "On a certain vowel template asymmetry in Bangla" (SALA 18, Jawaharlal Nehru U, New Delhi), and "The positive polarity item in Bangla" (Inaugural Plenary Lecture, SALA 21, U Konstanz).

Of his 230-plus articles and book chapters, some 35 were written in Esperanto and about 60 in Bangla, the latter helping to increase awareness of modern linguistics among Bangla speakers. His major publications include several translations from Bangla into Esperanto as well as a book in Esperanto on the status and influence of English in India (Stato kaj influo de la angla lingvo en Hinda Unio (Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 1977); plus the following publications in English: The otherness of English: India’s auntie tongue syndrome (New Delhi/London/Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1993); Explorations in Indian sociolinguistics (with R. Singh and J. K. Lele, New Delhi/London/Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995); and After etymology: Towards a substantivist linguistics (with A. Ford and R. Singh, Munich: Lincom, 2000).

Inga-Lill Hansson, University of Lund. Associate Professor of Linguistics, she is recognized as the leading authority on Akha/Hani and related languages within the Lolo-Burmese branch of the Tibeto-Burman family. She has conducted many years of fieldwork on these languages under difficult conditions in Thailand and China, using Thai, Chinese, and Akha as the languages of elicitation. She has recorded and transcribed hundreds of pages of religious texts from elderly shamans and animist priests and is herself recognized for her competence in chanting these ritual texts, which will soon be totally forgotten by the Akha themselves.

After studies in Chinese at Taipei U, Inga-Lill Hansson received her MA from U Copenhagen (1976) and her doctorate from U Lund (1983). She teaches Chinese, Thai, and Southeast Asian linguistics at U Lund. Since the mid-1970s, she has devoted herself to the study of Akha and several closely related languages of the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, achieving a depth of knowledge unmatched by any other scholar in that field. Her mastery of the archaic ritual language of the Akha has led her to be declared an 'honorary man' by the dwindling number of shamans and animist priests who can still chant the ancient texts. She is now in the process of publishing annotated versions of these texts, the first volume of which is entitled Akha death and sickness rituals, as well as a full-scale Akha grammar and dictionary.

Aryon Dall'Igna Rodrigues, University of Brasilia. Professor Emeritus Rodrigues is, by general consensus, the world's leading authority on Amazonian languages. He has founded the Departments of Linguistics in several Brazilian universities. He is renowned for his work on the morphosyntax of indigenous languages, as well as their historical interrelationship, is sensitive to the ethnolinguistic dimensions of minority languages, and is a brilliant fieldworker and inspired teacher.

Rodrigues received his doctorate in linguistics from U Hamburg in 1959 with a dissertation entitled Phonologie der Tupinamba Sprache. He has taught at several Brazilian universities, where he was instrumental in founding Departments of Linguistics, including the SU Campinas, Fed U Rio de Janeiro, and U Brasilia. He has carried out extensive fieldwork on the indigenous languages of Brazil and is a fluent speaker of several of them, including Guarani, Nhengatu, and Tupinamba. His book Linguas Brasileiras: Para o conhecimento das linguas indigenas (1986/1994) is the standard general reference work on Brazilian languages. He is the author of dozens of articles on all aspects of these languages, synchronic and diachronic, grammatical and phonological, ethnolinguistic. He is a distinguished teacher who has done much to train new generations of Brazilian linguists.

Other reports were presented by the chair of the Program Committee and the Editor of Language.

Ray Jackendoff, LSA President, presented the 7th biennial Leonard Bloomfield Book Award to Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum for their book, The Cambridge grammar of the English language (Cambridge U Press). The award was established to recognize the volume which makes the most outstanding contribution to the development of our understanding of language and linguistics. The citation read:

This extensive and readable account of current English usage makes accessible to professional and nonprofessional alike a vast body of linguistic knowledge about the English language drawn from many sources. It also makes available to this general readership many results of modern grammatical research. The authors offer a systematic and perspicuous account of English usage, underlining the importance of attending to the actual language of contemporary speakers. This grammar will help open the door to new approaches to the study and analysis of English as a language.

Eugene Nida received the 4th Victoria A. Fromkin Prize for Distinguished Service. The prize was established in 2000 to recognize extraordinary service to the Society and the discipline. D. Terence Langendoen presented the citation:
The Linguistic Society of America presents the Victoria A. Fromkin Prize for Distinguished Service to Dr. Eugene A. Nida, whose service to the Society and to the field of linguistics spans more than 60 years.

Dr. Nida joined the LSA in 1939, was elected Vice President in 1960, and President in 1968. Since that time, he has served as a financial advisor to the LSA, both informally and formally as a member of the Finance Committee. Upon his recommendation early on, the LSA invested its endowment fund in a broad and diversified range of securities holdings, with the result that our endowment benefited tremendously from the run-up in market values over the past 25 years. Throughout this time, Dr. Nida has shared his expertise without hesitation whenever it has been requested, on questions ranging from what stocks to buy or sell on a particular occasion to overall investment strategy.

Dr. Nida was involved in an important decision in 1984 when the LSA was faced with the question of whether to continue to rent office space in Washington or to terminate its sublease and purchase its own space. Without hesitation, he recommended that we purchase our own headquarters in Washington and finance it ourselves by allowing the endowment to hold the mortgage. As a result, the Society was able to purchase the condominium office it still occupies at Dupont Circle for a very reasonable price with no loss to its endowment funds, as the mortgage has now been paid off, and the value of the condo has appreciated handsomely.

However, Dr. Nida's service as a financial advisor to the LSA is only the tiniest bit of his contribution to the field as a whole. Throughout his years working first for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, then for the American Bible Society, and for the past 25 years in what can only technically be called retirement, he has been one of the most effective spokespersons for the field of linguistics that the world has ever known.

We are sorry he couldn't come to this meeting to accept the award in person, but we hope you'll join us in congratulating him in absentia.

The Resolutions Committee (Jean Berko Gleason, chair; Larry Hyman and Gillian Sankoff) presented the following resolutions which were unanimously approved:

1. For their services in organizing the program for the 2004 Annual Meeting in Boston, our sincere thanks to the Program Committee: Diane Brentari, Peter Culicover, Toshiyuki Ogihara, Margaret (Peggy) Speas, Rosalind Thornton, Lindsay Whaley, Draga Zec, and its chair, William Idsardi. We thank the Local Arrangements Committee chaired by Carol Neidle, and members Jonathan Barnes, Robert G. Lee, Lisa LaVoie, and Donca Steriade, for their help in planning the meeting.

For organizing the programs of the societies that meet jointly with us, our collegial thanks to Allan Metcalf of the American Dialect Society, Ed Lawson of the American Name Society, David Boe of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, Marlyse Baptista of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, and Victor Golla of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.

We thank all of these individuals for their time and efforts, for the high quality of the programs they have organized, and for providing a warm welcome in a very cold city.

2. For their service to the Society as officers of the organization, our special thanks to Frederick J. Newmeyer, Past President, and to retiring members of the Executive Committee Michael Krauss and Sarah G. Thomason, and to Sally McConnnell-Ginet, who completes her term as Secretary-Treasurer at the end of this meeting. We also wish to recognize and thank the organizers of the 2003 Linguistic Institute at Michigan State University: Dennis Preston, the director, and associate directors Barbara Abbott, Susan Gass, and Grover Hudson, along with Institute associates Erica Benson and Chunhua Ma.

3. Finally, our warm and special thanks to the staff of the Society, Mary Niebuhr and Sharon Winkler, and to our Executive Director, Margaret (Maggie) Reynolds.

Representatives from NSF and the Endangered Language Fund gave brief reports. The new Officers and Executive Committee members; Sally McConnell-Ginet, who completed her term as Secretary-Treasurer; and Dennis Preston, director of the 2003 LSA Linguistic Institute at Michigan State University, were recognized for their contributions to the Society. Before the session was adjourned, tokens of our great appreciation were presented to Sally McConnell-Ginet as she completed her term as Secretary-Treasurer and to Dennis Preston for organizing the 2003 Linguistic Institute adjourned.