- August 1 is the abstract submission deadline for the LSA's 2009 Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Laurels to Linguists
Congratulations!
Andrew Garrett, who came to Berkeley in 1995, "epitomizes the teacher-scholar," says Professor Sharon Inkelas, Chair of Linguistics. His current research is in two areas: historical linguistics and the structure of Yurok, an endangered indigenous language of Northern California. He teaches a wide range of courses from the graduate course in field methods to the large Linguistics 100, Introduction to Linguistic Science. Of special note is his work, combining research and teaching outside the classroom, with the Yurok Tribe: during a leave year, he drove the 600 mile round trip twice a month to present grammar lessons to Yurok teachers. The Committee praised Garrett's exceptional ability to synthesize information, his great scholarly mind, his enthusiasm, and the high standards he sets for his students. A former student, now a professor, writes, "I still pattern much of what I do in the classroom after what I observed when taking his classes, knowing all the while that whatever success I may have achieved in my teaching career so far, it is still just a pale reflection of its etymological source."
In October 2007, the AAAS Council elected 471 members as Fellows of AAAS. These individuals will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held on 16 February 2008 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. Five scholars were elected in the Section on Linguistics and Language Sciences. They are:
- Mark C. Baker, Rutgers University (LSA member)
- Ursula Bellugi, Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania (LSA member)
- Joan Maling, National Science Foundation (LSA member)
- David Poeppel, University of Maryland
Wendy K. Wilkins (U North Texas) has been appointed Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs.
David J. Silva (U Texas at Arlington) has been named Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.
LSA Members Susan Gal (U Chicago), John Goldsmith (U Chicago), Terence Parsons (UCLA), and Ivan Sag (Stanford U) were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.
Susan Gal Is Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Professor Gal completed her doctorate in Anthropology (and in the Language Behavior Research Laboratory) in 1976 at the University of California, Berkeley, with specialization in the role of language in culture and society, in gender theory, and Eastern Europe. This was followed by an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellowship in psycholinguistics, also at Berkeley. Her first large research project resulted in a book, Language Shift (1979), that described the linguistic practices of a minority population in Eastern Europe, the making of ethnicity in the post-World War II period, and the process by which, through a shift in ideas and evaluations of its languages, a bilingual community becomes monolingual in one of its languages. In subsequent research she has taken up comparative questions, focusing on the linguistic practices and politics of ethnic minorities throughout Europe, on linguistic consequences of language shift, the creation of publics, and on women's linguistic resources and strategies worldwide. Currently, she is engaged in three related research projects. The first concerns gender relations and gender discourses as they shape and constrain the political and economic processes of the Eastern European transformations. A book emerging from this research, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (2000, co-authored with Gail Kligman), won the Heldt Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. A second project examines the cultural roots of political rhetoric, its translation and circulation as textual genres travel across regions and social domains. The public rituals and media rhetoric through which the transition away from socialism was accomplished in Eastern Europe, and the language ideologies of the period, provide a privileged view of the relationship between language, circulation and politics under communism and after. The third project -- co-authored with Judith T. Irvine -- theorizes the cultural bases of language differentiation and change. It explores the semiotic processes through which linguistic ideologies recognize variation and differentiation in a sociolinguistic field and come to understand, justify, and often change that variation.
John Goldsmith is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science. His current research interests lie in the history of linguistic thought, and the development of machine learning models for the inference of linguistic structure from raw textual data. He is spending the academic year 2006-2007 working with Bernard Laks at the Université de Paris X (Nanterre), writing a book entitled Battle in the Mind Fields, dealing with the development of the mind sciences in the 20th century. Since 1997, he has been working on an open-source computational linguistics project named Linguistica, whose goal is to automatically develop a morphological analysis of an unknown language from a raw sample of text, using the tools of information theory to make explicit what linguistic structure is (see http://linguistica.uchicago.edu). The two projects are ultimately one, because both are attempts to explicitly answer the questions: What makes a good linguistic analysis? What is the relationship between the notions of linguistic learnability and psychological learnability?
Terence Parsons is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of California - Los Angeles. Professor Parsons received his PhD from Stanford University in 1966. He works on the semantics of natural language, trying to develop theories of truth and meaning for natural language similar to those devised for artificial languages by philosophical logicians. This is based in part on work by linguists on natural language syntax. A few years ago, he completed a book investigating the hypothesis that the logical forms of sentences of English contain (unexpressed) quantification over events; the book explores the evidence for this hypothesis, and tries to develop a systematic semantics based on this idea. More recently he has been working on the question of meaning for natural language, inspired by work of Frege and Russell. His work also touches on metaphysical matters, where he has investigated the topics of nonexistent objects, and (recently) of indeterminate identity. He has also done some historical-critical work on Frege, and on the early Russell, and he remains interested in these topics, as well as in medieval theories of semantics, and the history of logic in general.
Ivan A. Sag (BA, Rochester 1971; MA, Penn 1973; PhD, MIT 1976) is Professor of Linguistics, Director of the Program in Symbolic Systems, and a Senior Researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information. He has previously held fellowships at Stanford, the University of Chicago, Utrecht University, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The University of Bucharest named him Professor Honoris Causa in 2001 and in 2005 he received the Victoria A. Fromkin Prize from the Linguistic Society of America for his distinguished contributions to the field of linguistics.
Trained originally in Sanskrit and Indo-European studies, Sag's research contributions have been centered in the areas of grammatical theory, semantics, and language processing. He is the author or coauthor of 10 books, as well as over 100 articles in venues as diverse as Linguistics & Philosophy and Nature Neuroscience. Sag is internationally known for his work on syntactic theory, which has focussed primarily on constraint-based, lexicalist models of grammar, and their relation to theories of language processing.
About the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1780, the Academy is a learned honorary society that recognizes distinguished achievement in the natural sciences,
social sciences, arts, and humanities, and conducts programs on societal issues. It is perhaps best known to the public
through its quarterly journal, Daedalus. Current members number about 4,000. According to Emilio Bizzi, President of the
Academy, Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent
contributions to their disciplines and to society at large. In addition to the four members of the LSA, this year's new
Fellows include former Vice President Albert Gore, Jr.; former Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor;
New York Mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg; Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt; New York Times investigative
correspondent James Risen; filmmaker Spike Lee; economists Gregory Mankiw and Murray Weidenbaum; astronomer Donald Brownlee;
robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks; Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter; supercomputer expert David Shaw; pianist
Emanuel Ax; historian Nell Painter; former White House official and Berkeley Law Dean Christopher Edley;
classicist Sabine MacCormack; and international public health leader Allan Rosenfield. For more information about this
year's fellows, click here.
Hans Boas was honored in March 2007 with the "Hugo-Moser Prize in Germanic Linguistics", awarded by the Institute for the German Language. He received the award for his work on Texas German, including the creation of an on-line multi-media archive of Texas German recordings, including their transcriptions and translations. Read more...
Elizabeth Closs Traugott was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Uppsala, Sweden, in January 2007.
Fulbright Scholars for 2006-07
Stephanie M. Latkovski, Associate Dean of International and Second-Language Education, University of Chicago: Ukraine.
Mark William Lencho, Associate Professor of Languages and Literatures, University of Wisconsin at Whitewater: Slovakia.
Janet Ayers Martinez-Bernal, Instructor of Languages and Communication, Cochise College: Mexico.
Stephanie Robin Ormes Quizar, Professor of English, Metropolitan State College of Denver: Czech Republic.
Linda Stump Rashidi, Associate Professor of Languages and Literature, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania: Bulgaria.
Milton Stephen Seegmiller, Professor of Linguistics, Montclair State University: Moldova.
The Fulbright Scholar Program is sponsored by the US Department of State and administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.
Leanne Hinton (UC Berkeley) was awarded a 2006 Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. The purpose of the Lannan Fellowship for Cultural Freedom is to encourage and support individuals who are leaders in American and foreign communities to contemplate, reflect, write and study. As a direct result, the grantees will increase their own level of knowledge in this area and be able to more effectively communicate with and educate the general public in this area. The money provided with the fellowship may be used for travel, study, research, or other similar purposes.
John Ohala (UC Berkeley), Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics, was awarded the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Medal for Scientific Achievement at its annual meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, 17-22 October 2006. This medal, the 12th such awarded since 1988, recognizes cumulative scientific contributions to the field of speech communication. His research is centered in experimental phonology and phonetics and ethological aspects of communication, including speech perception, sound change, phonetic and phonological universals, psychological aspects of phonology, and sound symbolism.
Previous recipients of the ISCA Medal have included Gunnar Fant (1989), Jim Flanagan (1991), Adrian Fourcin (1991), Ken Stevens (1995), Mario Rossi (1997), Fred Jelinek (1999), Louis Pols (2001), Ilse Lehiste (2002), Jens Blauert (2003), Manfred Schroeder (2004), and Graeme Clark (2005).
Jeri J. Jaeger (U Buffalo-SUNY) received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Joseph Aoun (USC) has been named President of Northeastern University. Click here to learn more.
Ellen Kaisse (U WA) has been named Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities at the University of Washington.
Stephen Anderson (Yale) has been named the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. Click here to learn more.
Brian Joseph (OSU) has been awarded an honorary PhD from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
Walt Wolfram (NCState) was named Tar Heel of the Week on the occasion of the premier of his latest production now on DVD, "The Queen Family: Appalachian Tradition and Black Porch Music."
Fulbright Scholars for 2005-06
Andresen, Julie Tetel
Associate Professor, Department of English, Duke University, Durham, NC
Lecturing: Social and Political Issues in American Language Studies: Past and Present
University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
October 2005 - July 2006Blanton, Mackie Joseph-Venet
Associate Dean, Student Affairs, Division of Student Affairs, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA
Lecturing: Linguistics
Ege University, Izmir, Turkey
September 2005 - June 2006Danaher, David Scott
Associate Professor, Department of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin--Madison, Madison, WI
Lecturing: Cognitive Linguistics: Metaphor Theory and Cognitive Semantics Through Slavic Language Data
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
February 2006 - June 2006Idsardi, William James
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Lecturing and Research: Canadian Raising: The Cognitive Science of Dialects
York University, Toronto, Canada
January 2006 - May 2005
(Fulbright-York University Chair)Ka, Omar
Associate Professor and Coordinator, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD
Lecturing and Research: Phonology and Language Planning; Developing Literacy: Issues Facing Language Policy in Africa
Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar, Senegal
Gaston Berger University, Saint Louis, Senegal
September 2005 - July 2006Ragan, Peter H.
Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL
Lecturing: Sharing Language Across Cultures
Teacher's Center, Ilan County, Ilan City, Taiwan
August 2005 - July 2006Rickford, John R.
Professor and Director, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Lecturing and Research: Field-Recording and Quantitative Linguistic Analysis of Jamaican Creole
University of the West Indies--Mona, Kingston, Jamaica
January 2006 - May 2006Robinson, Douglas Jack
Professor, Department of English, University of Mississippi, University, MS
Lecturing: Translation and Linguistics in Russia
Voronezh State University, Voronezh, Russia
September 2005 - July 2006The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.
Robert Van Valin (U at Buffalo) has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award to Outstanding Scholars resident outside Germany from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Ray Jackendoff has been named the first Seth Merrin Professor of the Humanities at Tufts University. He also is serving as Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies.
Peter Culicover, Distinguished Humanities Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State U, has won an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, presented annually to scientists and scholars with internationally recognized academic qualifications. Award winners are invited to carry out research projects of their own choice in Germany in cooperation with colleagues.
Scott Schwenter, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State U, has accepted a year-long residential fellowship at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences. These fellowships are awarded to approximately 48 invited scholars who are free to work on whatever scholarly projects they choose.
Guy Bailey (U TX-San Antonio) will become the new chancellor of U MO-Kansas City 1 January 2006.
Sheila Blumstein (Brown U), Frederick J. Newmeyer (U WA), and Keren Rice (U Toronto) were named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: Geoffrey K. Pullum (UC-Santa Cruz), James Rogers (Earlham C), and Barbara C. Scholz (San Jose SU) were granted fellowships for 2005-2006 to complete their book, New logical foundations for linguistics.
Recipients of 2005 Native Language Preservation and Maintenance Grants
in Alaska from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
• Kotzebue Native Village—3-year grant to complete organizational
development for a major expansion of Kotzebue’s existing K-6 language
immersion school
• Sealaska Heritage Institute (Juneau)—2-year grant to produce
hardcopy, online, and CD-ROM dictionaries of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshiam
• Gulkana Village Council—1-year grant to assess the current
status and viability of Ahtna Athabascan
• Chickaloon Native Village—3-year grant to expand the Ahtna
Athabascan language skills of two younger language teachers which will allow
them to teach a total immersion class.
Susan Goldin-Meadow (U Chicago) and John McCarthy (U Massachusetts-Amherst) were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
Goldin-Meadow, whose research focuses on the use and meaning of gesture, is president of the Cognitive Development Society and chair-elect for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Section on Linguistics and Language Science. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development and serves on the editorial boards of Cognitive Science, Cognitive Development and Gesture.
Goldin-Meadow, who joined the Chicago faculty in 1976, has published extensively on gesture. She has found, for example, that children who have never heard a language can nevertheless make up their own gesture language, and that people who are blind and have never seen gesture nevertheless gesture in much the same way sighted people do. Her work also has shown that students perceive information in math lessons that teachers convey unconsciously through their gestures.
She is the author of The Resilience of Language: What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Tells Us About Language-Learning in General and Hearing Gesture: Our Hands Help us Talk and Think.
Goldin-Meadow received a B.A. from Smith College in 1971, and an M.A. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1975, both in psychology, from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently the LSA delegate to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
John McCarthy, Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, works in phonological theory, especially at the phonology-morphology interface. His current research deals with a range of issues arising in and around optimality theory, a general theory of constraint interaction. McCarthy's research is often informed by evidence drawn from the Semitic languages.
McCarthy earned his bachelor's degree in linguistics and Near East languages from Harvard College in 1975 and a doctorate in linguistics and philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. He was an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin from 1979-84 and an associate professor from 1984-85. He was also a consultant to AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey from 1984-86, and an instructor at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institutes: Stanford University, 1987; University of California, Santa Cruz, 1991; and Cornell University, 1997. McCarthy has taught at UMass Amherst since 1985. He was head of the Department from 1993-96.
He is the author of A Thematic Guide to Optimality Theory (Cambridge, 2002), editor or co-editor of four books, including Optimality Theory in Phonology: A Reader (Blackwell, 2003), and numerous articles. In addition to teaching at three LSA Summer Linguistic Institutes, McCarthy has also served on the LSA Program Committee.
About the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1780, the Academy is a learned honorary society that recognizes distinguished achievement in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, and conducts programs on societal issues. It is perhaps best known to the public through its quarterly journal, Daedalus. Current members number about 4,000. According to Patricia Meyer Spacks, President of the Academy, Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large. Others selected for induction this year include Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado; William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; sculptor and painter Jeff Koons; actor and director Sindey Poitier; journalist Tom Brokaw; architect Maya Lin; and playwright Tony Kushner. A total of 196 fellows were elected this year. In 2004, three LSA members were elected to the Academy: Joan Bresnan (Stanford U), Brian Joseph (Ohio SU), and Janet Pierrehumbert (Northwestern U).
