The 75th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America was held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, DC, 4-7 January 2001. The American Dialect Society, American Name Society, North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, and the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics met in conjunction with the LSA. There were 850 participants.
The Annual Business Meeting was held 5 January and attended by approximately 75 members. The Secretary-Treasurer reported highlights of actions taken by the Executive Committee on 4 January. At the recommendation of the Executive Committee, the members elected Hwang-cherng Gong (Acad Sinica), Jean Kellens (C de France, Paris), and Ki-Moon Lee (Seoul Natl U) for honorary membership. The citations presented read:
Professor Hwang-cherng Gong, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Professor Hwang-cherng Gong (1934- ), who received his PhD from the University of Munich in 1974, is a Senior Research Fellow of Academia Sinica. He is undoubtedly among the most highly respected scholars in the areas of Archaic Chinese and Sino-Tibetan linguistics, and in the study of Tangut, a deceased minority language of Northern Sung Dynasty which holds the key to several long-standing issues in the study of Proto-Chinese and Proto-Sino-Tibetan. In each of these areas of research, he holds the position of a world-class leader. His reconstruction of the phonological system of Archaic Chinese is, by common consent, the most authoritative to date, defining another 'watershed' since the works of Bernard Carlgren and Fang-Kuei Li. His Proto-Tangut phonology is now commonly adopted by scholars in China, Japan, Russia, and the United States. On the basis of his research on Archaic Chinese and Proto-Tangut phonology, and comparative study of these with classical Tibetan texts, Gong has now completed a large portion of his reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, including the system of vowels, rhymes, and certain prefixes. He is currently in the process of completing the reconstruction of initials (consonants and syllable onsets) of Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The successful completion of this will be the most important breakthrough in the hundred-year history of the field. This part is the 'last chapter' to be added to the enterprise of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, and international scholars of the field are holding their breath in anticipation of Gong's results, as they will be of utmost importance for scholars in the field in the decades to come. Professor Gong has won numerous national awards from the National Science Council of the Republic of China and is held in the highest regard by those in his areas of specialization and/or those who have associated with him. Although his research has not brought him to the US often, in 1996-97 he was a Visiting Professor at UC-Berkeley. In the summer of 1997, he was invited to teach a course on Proto-Chinese and Proto-Sino-Tibetan at the LSA Linguistic Institute held at Cornell University.
Professor Jean Kellens, Collège de France, Paris. Professor Jean Kellens is probably the greatest living authority on Avestan, our most archaic Iranian language. Beginning his Iranian studies in 1963 at the University of Liège in his native Belgium, Kellens subsequently moved to Erlangen, Germany, to study with the great Indo-Iranianist Karl Hoffmann. Returning to Liège, he became a full professor there in 1986. In 1993 he moved to Paris to occupy a chair at the Collège de France. The past four decades have witnessed a revolution in Avestan studies. Philological reevaluation of the Avestan manuscripts, a project originally spearheaded by Hoffmann, has led to a new understanding of the sounds and forms of the language. No name is more closely associated with the 'new look' of Avestan, and especially of its conservative Gathic dialect, than that of Jean Kellens. His 1974 dissertation-based book, Les noms-racines de l'Avesta, dealt exhaustively with a single grammatical class and accurately described it for the first time. A major contribution in itself, it was dwarfed ten years later by Le verbe avestique, Kellens's monumental compendium and analysis of every single Avestan verb form in the light of the new philology. No mere database of the usual type, Le verbe avestique is a basic resource--a work which, even if he had written nothing more, would have assured Kellens a place among the immortals of Iranian and Indo-Iranian studies. But his productivity continued. Les textes vieil-avestiques, the three-volume edition and translation of the Gathic Avestan corpus that Kellens brought out in collaboration with Eric Pirart in 1988-91, is the basis for all modern work on these texts. By the end of the 1990s, Kellens's publication list included over 140 items--almost all of them testifying to his role in restoring Avestan and ancient Iranian to their rightful place in Indo-Iranian and Indo-European comparative linguistics.
Professor Ki-Moon Lee, Seoul National University, Korea. Professor Ki-Moon Lee is widely recognized as the world's foremost authority on the history of the Korean language. Educated at Seoul National University, he is now Professor Emeritus of Korean language and linguistics at that university. He has also held scholarly and teaching positions at Harvard, the University of Washington, Columbia, the University of Tokyo, and the LSA Summer Institute. He has served as President of the Linguistic Society of Korea, the Society of Korean Language and Literature, the Society of Korean Linguistics, and the Altaic Society of Korea. Among his numerous professional awards and honors, he is a recipient of the Korean National Cultural Prize for Most Outstanding Publication, the Samil Cultural Prize for Most Outstanding Publication, the Crown Medal for Cultural Achievement, the Korean National Academy of Sciences Award, and the Magnolia Medal of the Nation. In 1998 he was awarded the Fukuoka Grand Prize in Japan, the only linguist, as well as the only Korean, ever to receive that honor. Since 1982 he has been a member of the Korean National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Lee is the author of 21 books and around 150 articles, mostly in Korean, but also in English, Japanese, French, and German. However, it is upon quality rather than quantity that his world-wide reputation rests. He has published seminal works on virtually every aspect of Korean historical linguistics, and these works form the basis of almost all serious research in the field today. Lee's comparative research on Alta, Manta, and Mongolian; his explanation of the nature of Old Korean and its relationship to Japanese; his periodization of the Korean language; and his interpretations of Middle Korean materials are all considered authoritative. He is the first scholar to apply convincingly the method of internal reconstruction to Middle Korean, supplemented by comparative data from the modern dialects. Noted for his spare and lucid prose style, Lee has also written on the social and historical circumstances surrounding the modern 'enlightenment' period and its language scholars; he has clarified the background of the fifteenth-century invention of the Korean alphabet. Ki-Moon Lee is a scholar of great range and depth and one of Korea's greatest and most influential scholars, in any field.
Other reports were presented by the chair of the Program Committee, the director of the 2001 Linguistic Institute, and the Editor of Language.
David Perlmutter, LSA President, presented the 3rd bienniel Linguistics, Language, and the Public Interest Award to Geoffrey Nunberg (XEROX Parc) for his broadcasts on language for the radio program "Fresh Air" on National Public Radio. The award recognizes work that effectively increases public awareness and understanding of linguistics and language. The citation presented read:
Geoffrey Nunberg's broadcasts for the NPR program "Fresh Air" have made linguistics come alive for millions of radio listeners. With just the right blend of technical sophistication, timeliness, and humor, he gives our discipline a graceful and powerful public voice.
Paul Chapin (NSF) received the first 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 presented read:
The Linguistic
Society of America is proud to award the Victoria A. Fromkin Prize for Public
Service to Dr. Paul Chapin for over 25 years of distinguished public service
for the field of linguistics. Paul received his PhD in linguistics in 1967 and
was a member of the faculty at the University of California-San Diego until
1975. From 1975 until October 1999, Paul served as Program Director for Linguistics
at the National Science Foundation and is currently Senior Program Officer for
Scientific Initiatives at NSF. Paul is the very paragon of public service in
our field, having sacrificed what would have undoubtedly been an outstanding
career in university teaching and research to work at NSF. He has dedicated
most of his professional life to the support of his colleagues in their linguistics
research and has encouraged the field to grow and develop along the lines that
its practitioners have wanted, not in accordance with his own ideas of what
counts as 'good' linguistic research. As a result, the field has developed in
ways that could not have been anticipated when he took the Linguistics Program
Director position at NSF in 1975.
The Resolutions Committee, (Jeff Connor-Linton, chair, Donna Jo Napoli and John
Ohala) presented the following resolutions which were unanimously approved:
The Annual Meeting
Special Service to the Society
The Resolutions Committee presented the following resolution, drafted and forwarded by the Executive Committee:
The Linguistic Society of America affirms that signed languages used by deaf communities are full-fledged languages with all the structural characteristics and range of expression of spoken languages. They have rule-governed systems of articulation, word-formation, sentence structure, and meaning, which have been the subject of scholarly study since the pioneering work of Dr. William Stokoe (1919-2000) over 40 years ago. These languages are not merely a set of informal gestures, nor are they a signed version of any particular spoken language. American Sign Language, the language of deaf communities in the United States and most of Canada, goes back almost two hundred years and is historically and structurally unrelated to English. It is also the vehicle of a distinguished deaf culture and has a tradition of visual literature.
The LSA affirms for signed languages such as ASL all the rights and privileges attendant to any spoken languages, including the right to satisfy a student's academic foreign language requirement, just as Spanish, Chinese, Navajo, or any other spoken language can. Because communication through language is a basic human need and right, the LSA supports laws that ensure interpreters for deaf people in their interactions with hearing people who do not sign. We also encourage American educational institutions at all levels to create opportunities for learning ASL so that those in regular contact with members of the deaf community can study and learn ASL, and to foster the study of ASL by supporting research on it and by developing educational degree programs for teachers of ASL, for interpreters of ASL, and for those interested in ASL Studies.
After discussion and amendment, members requested the resolution be submitted to the membership. [See insert.] Representatives from the NSF, NIMH, and the Endangered Language Fund gave brief reports. The new Officers and Executive Committee members were recogized, and the session was adjourned.