LSA Bulletin
March 2005
2005 Annual Meeting
The 79th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America was held at the Oakland Marriott City Center Hotel, 6-9 January 2005. 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 1,100 registered participants.
LSA President Joan Bybee officially opened the meeting at 7:15 PM on 6 January immediately preceding the first plenary address.
The Annual Business Meeting was held 7 January and attended by approximately 70 members. The President called the meeting to order and recognized the presence of a number of past presidents. The Secretary-Treasurer reported highlights of actions taken by the Executive Committee on 6 January. At the recommendation of the Executive Committee, Society members present elected Anvita Abbi (Jawaharlal Nehru U), Gerrit Jan Dimmendaal (U Cologne), and Rodney Desmond Huddleston (U Queensland) to honorary membership. The citations presented read:
Anvita Abbi, Jawaharlal Nehru U, New Delhi, India. Professor of linguistics at the Centre for Linguistics and English, Abbi has made major contributions to Indian/South Asian and general linguistics. Her research combines a focus on linguistic typology and language contact with fieldwork on various languages of India, including Hindi and Panjabi, but most significantly the so-called tribal languages, belonging to virtually every language family of South Asia. These include Cherapunji (Tibeto-Burman), Bangani (Indo-Aryan, with a possible non-Indo-Aryan Indo-European substrate), Munda languages of Chattisgarh, and most recently—and significantly—Andamanese (a language isolate). Most of these languages are on the endangered list. Andamanese, for instance, has only 37 remaining speakers. The significance of her on-site work on these languages extends far beyond the specific data that it adds to our knowledge of human language and the theoretical challenges posed by some of these data. By taking students from her center along on her field trips, she has been providing valuable training for new generations of linguists who are thus equipped to continue this valuable work.
Abbi received her PhD in linguistics from Cornell U in 1975. A revised version of her dissertation was published in 1980, under the title Semantic grammar of Hindi: A study of reduplication. Since 1976 she has been teaching at Jawaharlal Nehru U and producing an impressive series of publications, including Reduplication in South Asian languages: An areal, typological, and historical study (1991); an edited volume, Languages of tribal and indigenous peoples of India: The ethnic space; and most recently, A manual of linguistic fieldwork and structures of Indian languages. In addition, she has published some 50 articles and reviews. Perhaps the greatest impact has been her Manual of linguistic fieldwork, which has received wide recognition, including in Books Noted in the SSILA Newsletter (6.1 through 22.1), a publication serving an audience far removed from India and its linguistic traditions. Her work has been recognized by editorial positions; visiting professorships at universitities in the United States, Germany, and Australia; advisory positions with UNESCO; membership on the Board of Directors of Terralingua; and grants from the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London) for field research on Andamanese.
Gerrit Jan Dimmendaal, U Cologne, Germany. Professor of African linguistics at the Institute of African Studies, Dimmendaal has made major and ground-breaking contributions to historical and contact linguistics, descriptive and documentary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and typological linguistics, combined with first-hand field investigations of endangered languages. He is a pioneer in the study of language endangerment. His work deals with three of the four linguistic phyla of Africa: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo. His fieldwork has a similar breadth; he has worked in central, east, and northeastern Africa, especially in the Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Sudan. His contributions have been recognized by editorial appointments and most recently through membership on the advisory boards of the leading endangered languages research funding programs, the DOBES program of the VW Foundation (Germany) and the Rausing Foundation program for language documentation at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). He has held visiting fellowships at universities in various African countries, the United States, Australia, and Germany and has been recently appointed Distinguished Visiting Scholar for 2005 at the Institute of Advanced Studies, La Trobe University, Australia.
Dimmendaal received his MA from Leiden U in 1978 with a ground-breaking historical study and reconstruction of Cross River languages—a subgroup of the Benue-Congo languages. He received his PhD (cum laude) in 1982 from the same university with a dissertation, The Turkana language, which was published a year later (1983). Since his PhD he has produced over 70 articles and several edited volumes. The latter include The Surmic languages and cultures (1998), the first comprehensive coverage of Surmic, as well as a book on participant coding in 12 little-studied languages of Africa (in progress). His articles have made insightful contributions on a large variety of topics, including mixed languages, areal features, and genetic relationships; fieldwork in the African context; and language death. In addition to training European scholars at his home university, he has trained Africans from various parts of the continent (Senegal, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan) to document hitherto undescribed languages. For this purpose he has initiated a program of on-site training for African students at their home universities, for instance in the Sudan, where he provides teaching and supervision twice a year under difficult circumstances.
Rodney Desmond Huddleston, Emeritus, U Queensland, Australia. First Class Honours graduate of Corpus Christi C, Cambridge, in modern and medieval languages in 1970 and awarded the Bishop Green Cup for best BA of year. PhD in linguistics, U Edinburgh in 1963. He taught at Edinburgh, London, and Reading before moving to U Queensland, where he spent most of his career. His work has been recognized through his election as Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1984) and Senior Research Fellow, Australian Research Council (1993-98), through a personal chair at U Queensland in 1990, and through the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004 for his monumental Cambridge grammar of the English language.
Huddleston has made significant contributions to linguistics and especially to the linguistic investigation of English. Numerous incisive articles on difficult problems appeared in many of the top refereed journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Language, and the Journal of Linguistics. These included an incisive argument that English does not have a future tense and a series of papers making an absolutely compelling case in simple descriptive grammatical terms for the view that the auxiliaries of English are verbs that are heads, not dependents, in their clauses. His major publications include Introduction to transformational syntax (1976), which is remembered as one of the most careful texts of that time, and the monumental Cambridge grammar of the English language, published in 2002 in collaboration with a number of members of the Linguistic Society of America. In all of his work, a scrupulously careful scholarship is married with a resolve to describe English scientifically and correctly and to fulfill the hopes of Leonard Bloomfield that linguistic analysis could be freed not only from senseless prescriptivism but also from the shackles of long-established but erroneous description.
Other reports were presented by the chair of the Program Committee and the Editor of Language.
Joan Bybee, LSA President, presented the 5th Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award to Deborah Tannen, University Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown U. The award was established to recognize individuals engaged in on-going efforts to educate the public about linguistics and language. The citation read:
The immediate impetus for this year's award is Professor Tannen's 2001 book, I only say this because I love you, which explores ways in which talk within the family, where we expect the most comfort and support, can sometimes be the source of the greatest discomfort and antagonism. The key to understanding and perhaps avoiding such difficulties, Tannen suggests, is to distinguish between the MESSAGES and METAMESSAGES our words convey and to attend to the ALIGNMENTS between conversational participants that our words build on and help to establish.
I only say this because I love you is, however, only the latest in a series of widely popular books in which Tannen has shared the insights of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis--and her knack for analyzing the nuances of everyday conversation--with the general public over the past 20 years. The list begins with Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends (1984), and includes You just don't understand (1990) which was on the New York Times bestseller list for four years and sold over a million and half copies, Talking from 9 to 5: Women and men at work (1994), and The argument culture (1998). In 8 general audience books like these, backed up by another 10 edited and coedited scholarly collections, e.g. Perspectives on silence (1985), Handbook of discourse analysis (2001), and numerous academic articles, Tannen has helped us all to understand better such topics as conversational strategy, concord and conflict, indirectness, pacing, turn-taking, and silence and how these relate to differences of gender, ethnicity, class, and individual style.
The popularity of Tannen's general audience books and her countless columns in The Washington Post and other newspapers is due in part to the highly readable and accessible style in which they are written, a gift that many academics find elusive. But they also derive in part from the myriad appearances she has made on radio and television shows (like the Diane Rehm and Oprah Winfrey shows), and from her willingness to participate in other public discussions (like the May 2004 Aurora Forum at Stanford) without cutting back on her teaching and professional responsibilities. As she has said recently, she maintains her active involvement in the media and her active general audience writing out of a sense of responsibility to represent the (socio)linguistic viewpoint to the public and to add the linguistic perspective to that of psychologists and other commentators on relationships and public life. The Linguistic Society of America's Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award recognizes and commends her for the success with which she has fulfilled this responsibility, and continues to do so.
Ivan Sag received the 5th Victoria A. Fromkin Prize for Distinguished Service. The prize was established in 2000 to recognize extraordinary service to the Society and the discipline. The citation read:
Ivan A. Sag, this year's recipient of the Victoria A. Fromkin Prize for service to the field of linguistics, is a force of nature. Luckily for his colleagues in linguistics, that amazing force has been directed towards many projects for the general good of the discipline. The LSA is especially grateful for the extraordinary talents and energy he has invested in summertime linguistic institutes. To many, Ivan is "Mr. Institute": Not only did he direct early in his career the enormously successful 1987 Stanford institute, but he has served as associate director for three other institutes, including the upcoming MIT-Harvard institute, and, while still a graduate student, as "special consultant" for the 1974 U MA-Amherst institute. A student at three institutes during his graduate career, he has been on the faculty of at least eight more, organizing conferences or workshops at several including one where he did not teach. Through his own direct organizing skills as well as serving on committees and helping draft various documents, he has helped the LSA keep institutes successful. Ivan upped both the intellectual and the economic payoff, not only introducing corporate sponsorship for institute courses but even turning them into ongoing revenue streams by marketing tapes. Beyond these administrative achievements, Ivan has been central to creating the special atmosphere that makes institutes so attractive to linguists at all stages of their careers: Playing with the "Dead Tongues", organizing accommodations in empty sorority houses replete with French chefs, engaging colleagues and students in lively linguistic discussions, and more. Institute concerns by no means exhaust Ivan's involvement in the LSA: Not only is he one of the most faithful attendees and regular presenters at the Annual Meetings, but he has served with distinction on the Executive Committee, the Program Committee (as chair one year), and in several other capacities including as liaison to the Association for Computational Linguistics. Ivan has also been very active in forging international connections among linguists, not only through lecturing and teaching abroad but also through organizing conferences and undertaking research with colleagues around the globe. Ivan Sag is not only a very distinguished and influential linguistic scholar, he is also an exceptionally committed and effective citizen of the larger linguistics community, not just here in America but throughout the world.
The Resolutions Committee (Elizabeth C. Traugott, chair; Mark Baker; and Ellen Kaisse) presented the following resolutions which were unanimously approved:
1. Whereas there are few institutional norms about how to recognize electronic databases in tenure and promotion cases, the Linguistic Society of America supports the recognition of electronic databases of language material as academic publications. It supports the development of appropriate means of review of such resources so that the functionality, import, and scope of the projects can be assessed relative to other language resources and to theoretical papers. The LSA supports the treatment of digital resources as publications for consideration in tenure and promotion cases.
2. For their services in organizing the program for the 2005 Annual Meeting in Oakland, our sincere thanks to the Program Committee (Diane Brentari, Chair; Eugene Buckley; Peter Culicover; Toshiyuki Ogihara, Cathy O'Connor; Peggy Speas; Lindsay Whaley; and Draga Zec).
We thank the Local Arrangements Committee (Geoffrey Pullum, Chair; Larry Hyman; Geoffrey Nunberg; and Rachelle Waksler) for their help in planning the meeting.
For their cooperation in organizing the programs of the societies that meet jointly with us, our collegial appreciation 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 and Adriennne Bruyn of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, and Victor Golla of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
For their service to the Society as officers of the LSA, our special thanks to Past President Ray Jackendoff, and to Executive Committee members Eve Clark, Stephen Anderson, and Bloch Fellow Kristen Syrett, whose terms are completed at the end of this meeting.
3. Our warm and special thanks to the staff of the Society, Rita Lewis, Mary Niebuhr, and Executive Director, Margaret Reynolds, for their tireless support throughout the year. Above all we appreciate the enormous and successful efforts that the Secretariat, especially Margaret Reynolds, made at the last minute to seamlessly transfer the meeting to Oakland.
We also thank the Oakland Marriott City Center and the Oakland Visitors Center for receiving us so graciously.
Representatives from the 2005 Linguistic Institute, NSF, NEH, and the
Endangered Language Fund gave brief reports. The 2005 President Mark Aronoff,
2005 Vice President/President-Elect Sally McConnell, and new Executive
Committee members Diane Lillo-Martin and Dennis Preston were introduced,
and the meeting was adjourned.