- Meeting registration and hotel reservations for the 2011 Annual Meeting are available online through December 20.
- Nominations for the LSA's new Early Career Award are due at the Secretariat by September 15th.
- Did you know that Classic Monographs of the LSA are available through the Society for a fraction of their cost elsewhere? Read more …
LSA Honors and Awards
2010 Pamela Munro and Catherine Willmond,
Let's Speak Chickasaw, Chikashshanompa' Kilanompoli' (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009)
A collaboration between a linguist and a native speaker, Let's Speak Chickasaw, Chikashshanompa' Kilanompoli' is both the first complete grammar of Chickasaw and its first textbook. It tells us much about Chickasaw grammar that was previously unknown or inaccessible. Its extraordinary depth, analytic sophistication, and lucid explanations of complex topics are a significant contribution to linguistics. It is also a timely model of a new type of pedagogical grammar for endangered languages aimed at community members, language teachers, linguists, and the public.
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2009 Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews,
The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (Cambridge, 2007)
The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact presents interesting new data and insightful analyses of bilingual development. Based on the most extensive bilingual corpus yet assembled and drawing on both generative and typological theoretical perspectives, the authors provide an extensive, informed and data-rich treatment of a difficult problem. The book sets a new standard for the study of childhood bilingualism, and shows how this study bears on many different areas of linguistics, including monolingual acquisition, language contact, syntactic theory, typology, and historical linguistics.
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2008 William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg,
The Atlas of North American English (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006)
The Atlas of North American English pictures the phonological divisions of
North American English and includes a CD-ROM and website database. The result of a
decade of interviews in metropolitan areas, ANAE combines boundary-making with careful
considerations of sound change.
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2006 R. M. W. Dixon, The Jarawara
Language of Southern Amazonia (Oxford University Press)
R. M. W. Dixon's The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia, written
with the assistance of Alan R. Vogel, is an invaluable record of a language in serious
danger of extinction. The complexities of the language are unraveled with a clarity
and insight that allow the reader to share in what the author describes as 'the
intellectual pleasure of working out such a magnificent system'.
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2004 Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al.,
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University
Press)
The Cambridge grammar of the English language is an 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.
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2002 Marianne Mithun, The Languages of Native
North America (Cambridge University Press)
Marianne Mithun's The languages of Native North America is
a reference work of permanent value, documenting the results of a century
of work on the indigenous languages of North America (a topic which,
we note, was an important concern for the scholar after whom this award
is named). The permanent presence of Native North American languages
in the records of human culture has been assured by the work that Mithun
surveys and contributes to. Her synthetic work is done expertly, but
in addition she contributes new and original observations on the basis
of direct personal study and fieldwork on the complex structures of
an array of little-studied languages. Her lucidly written book covers
the history of the subfield, a survey of structural properties (including
a wealth of examples), a catalogue of the language families including
in each a sketch of a representative language, carefully prepared maps,
and a massive bibliography. The book sets new standards for scholarship
in our field and on every page demonstrates to the reader not only Mithun's
deep scholarly concern but also her love and respect for the languages
of this continent.
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2000 Lyle Campbell, American Indian Languages:
The Historical Linguistics of Native America (Oxford University
Press)
Campbell’s book will stand as a landmark in American Indian linguistics
and in historical linguistics more generally. It combines encyclopedic
coverage of comparative and historical scholarship on languages of the
Americas with a critical assessment of methods and criteria of establishing
language relatedness. These strands are successfully brought together
in a rigorous presentation and evaluation of relationships among American
Indian languages.
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1998 Alice C. Harris and Lyle Campbell, Historical
Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Cambridge University Press)
Engaging a large body of earlier literature and drawing extensively
upon their own research, Professors Harris and Campbell present a set
of important, attractive, and testable hypotheses on the universals
and the limits of syntactic change. Despite the complexity of the topic,
the writing is clear and accessible, and the proposals are superbly
documented with material from a wide variety of languages. Historical
syntax in cross-linguistic perspective is a benchmark work in syntax
and historical linguistics.
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1996 William Labov, Principles of Linguistic
Change: Internal Factors (Blackwell Publishers)
The committee felt this book is a landmark in the study of language
change. It not only presents a coherent and compelling account of the
internal mechanics of phonological change, but it successfully integrates
this account with theoretical advances in grammatical theory, sociolinguistics,
and dialectology, as well as historical linguistics. Labov’s scholarship
in this work is unsurpassed and ranges from a proposed solution to the
Neogrammarian controversy, to an account of the changing dialect situation
in the United States, to proposals for applying the theory of lexical
phonology to the explanation of a set of historical paradoxes, and to
exploring the limits of functional explanation.
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1994 Johanna Nichols, Linguistic Diversity in
Space and Time (University of Chicago Press)
Professor Nichols’ book, Linguistic diversity in space and time
is a major contribution to linguistics, providing a novel framework
for studying language history at great time-depth and over vast distances.
The book pioneers an empiricist framework for the study of linguistic
prehistory which searches for correlations over a large sampling of
language and which examines structural, genetic, geographic, and population-related
factors.
Nichols identifies phenomena that are stable in various senses—universally,
genetically, and areally--and demonstrates how long range historical
inferences of various types can be drawn from such material. The book
is richly original, defining such new concepts as spread zones vs residual
zones, homeland vs colonized areas, hotbed and outlier distributions,
and global clines, and formulating a variety of important new morphosyntactic
dimensions.
Linguistic diversity in space and time is significant within
linguistics in that it places an old field, comparative linguistics,
in a comprehensive context, offering a multidimensional, rather than
solely genetic, approach to language prehistory. It is also significant
well beyond linguistics in that it makes it possible to consider the
independent contribution of language to cross-disciplinary scientific
attempts to reconstruct the peopling of the globe.
By example, the book reminds us of the interrelatedness of aspects of
linguistic work we often take to be highly separate, including the pursuit
of universal grammar, historical linguistics, and the sociolinguistics
of language change and of language contact. It demonstrates that the
work in each of these areas has implications for others, while offering
a framework in which this interrelatedness can fruitfully be pursued.
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1992 Keren Rice, A Grammar of Slave (Mouton
de Gruyter)
In bestowing the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 1989-91 on Keren
Rice’s A grammar of Slave, published by Mouton de Gruyter,
the Linguistic Society of America recognizes a work of exemplary scholarship
that presents in its depth and analytic detail not only an exhausting
account of the complex structure of Slave but one of the most complete
descriptions of an Athabascan language ever written. In its encyclopedic
scope and its organizational precision, A grammar of Slave
is a work of enduring value to the community of linguists.
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2010 Walt Wolfram, whose North Carolina Language and Life Project models sociolinguistic engagement and public outreach about the value and beauty of linguistic diversity. Through documentaries, museum exhibits, and dialect awareness curricula, Walt epitomizes his "principle of linguistic gratuity"": Researchers should seek ways to return linguistic favors to the speech communities in which they work.
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2009 Language Log, a collaborative science blog devoted to linguistics and written by a team of more than a dozen prominent linguists, almost all of whom are members of the Linguistic Society of America. The award will be accepted on behalf of the Language Log team by two of its members: University of Pennsylvania professor of phonetics Mark Y. Liberman (who founded Language Log in 2003 along with Geoffrey K. Pullum, who is now at the University of Edinburgh) and Stanford professor of linguistics Arnold M. Zwicky (who has been a prolific and prominent contributor since shortly after the blog was started).
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2006 Earl Rick Rickerson, producer of the radio series, "Talkin' about Talk, Year of Languages in the U.S". This series perfectly embodies the spirit of the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award. Each of 52 brief segments -- one for every week of the year -raises an intriguing question about language and calls on a noted linguist to discuss it. Lively and engaging as well as clear and succinct, these radio programs convey important principles of the science of language to a wide radio listenership.
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2005 Deborah Tannen, who through her writing and
public speaking has promoted the visibility of language and linguistics
as part of the national culture for over 20 years.
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.
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2003 John Rickford, co-author of Spoken Soul
(John Wiley, 2000) and author of substantive contributions to discussions
surrounding Ebonics and AAVE
John Rickford's career has placed a consistent priority on educating
the public about matters related to languages and cultures of the African
diaspora, especially African-Americans. His research helps the public
recognize the systematicity of vernacular varieties of language, a recognition
that is significant in countering racism in educational policies. His
recent co-authored work, Spoken Soul, enlightens readers about
those issues, at a particularly important moment in time, following
the widely publicized debates about Ebonics and education.
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2001 Geoffrey Nunberg, commentator on the NPR program
Fresh Air
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.
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1999 Eugene Searchinger, producer of The Human
Language, a public television series of three films distributed
in 1995
An independent filmmaker who immersed himself in the world of linguistics,
Eugene Searchinger has brought language, linguistics, and linguists
to the millions. With gripping footage, a deep respect for the subject
matter, and a touch of humor, Searchinger’s television series,
The Human Language, will be an enduring invitation to the wonders
of language.
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1997 Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct
(William Morrow, 1994)
The language instinct ‘weaves our vast knowledge of language
into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into
our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats.’
Not only does he explain linguistics to the general public, he emphasizes
linguistics’ role in understanding the ‘mind’—fundamental
to understanding our very humanity. ‘It is a part of a whole new
version of the human mind: not a general purpose computer but a collection
of instincts adapted to solving evolutionary significant problems—the
mind as a Swiss Army knife.’ Few who write about language are
as successful at reaching the general public as Professor Pinker. His
book was named one of the 10 Best Books of 1994 (all categories) by
The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Times
(London), and other newspapers; it has sold over 100,000 copies and
appeared on bestseller lists. It was widely excerpted, has been featured
on national television, and has been the subject of several PBS radio
programs. Finally, it has been reviewed positively in over 50 journals
and magazines.
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2006 Robert W. Young, The Navajo language (with Willie Morgan, 1980, 1987) and supplementary volume, The Analytic lexicon of Navajo (with Sally Midgette, 1992)
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2002 Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon, Native
Writings in Massachusett (APS, 1988)
Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon's Native writings in Massachusett
(APS, 1988) is, in the words of Ken Hale, a tour de force. Volume
1 contains the rich 17th- and 18th-century documentation of the Massachusett
language (also known as Wampanoag or Natick), including the native language
writings with translations and the Eliot Bible and documents related
to it along with discussion of the process involved in assembling, transcribing,
and translating the original documents; Volume 2 is a companion grammar.
This outstanding body of linguistic knowledge provides resources for
original research on Wampanoag. In addition, this text has been critical
for the revitalization of this language that has not been spoken in
many years. A citation would be incomplete without mention of the recent
efforts by Jessie Fermino to revive the language, work that could never
have occurred without the foundation of Goddard and Bragdon.
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2010 Dr. D. Terence Langendoen, Over the course of a 45-year career, Dr. Langendoen has served the LSA in every elective office (Member of the Executive Committee, Secretary-Treasurer, and President), on numerous committees, including the Program Committee and the Editorial Board of Language, and as Director of the 1986 Linguistic Institute. Beyond his work for the LSA, Dr. Langendoen has made important contributions to the linguistics profession in general. His wisdom, diligence, and good nature have made him a person much sought after for important tasks, and he has always responded with a will. He is an exemplary recipient of the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award.
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2007 N. Louanna Furbee is an outstanding recipient of the Victoria A. Fromkin award for service to the Linguistic Society of America and to the profession. Since her graduate days at the University of Chicago, her service to the field of linguistics has been exemplary.
Her service to the LSA alone is exemplary. She has served as the Archivist for the LSA since 1998 and, prior to that, was co-archivist for two years. In addition, she served on the Committee on the Status of Women (1977-1979) and the Language Review Committee (1984-85).
Professor Furbee's service to the profession is widespread and longstanding, and is too extensive to do it justice in these brief remarks. In addition to her deep commitment to the LSA, she has given no less generously to a host of other professional organizations. These include the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), where she served as President from 1987-1988; Vice-President (1986-87); Executive Committee (1987-89); Chair, The SSILA Book Award Committee (1988-89) and as a Member of the Selection Committee for the Mary R. Haas Book Award (1999-2001). She has also held positions in the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the American Anthropological Association, and served as the liaison to the American Association for the Advancement of Science for AAA, as well as the Foundation for Endangered Languages, to name just a few.
It would, however, be misleading to consider Professor Furbee's contributions to the field of linguistics just from the standpoint of her professional service. First and foremost she has contributed to the field through her research. A dedicated fieldworker, she has consistently demonstrated a deep commitment to the study of indigenous languages, working closely with and for the communities themselves.
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2006 Margaret W. Reynolds, Executive Director, Linguistic Society of America.
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2005 Ivan Sag, who for over 30 years has contributed
to the organizational and financial success of the Society and especially
to the development of Linguistic Institutes.
Ivan A. Sag, the 2005 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 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.
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2004 Eugene Nida, who has not only been a member
of the Society for over 60 years but who has served as Vice President
(1960) and President (1968) and as financial/investment advisor for
more than 30 years.
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.
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2003 Anthony Aristar and Helen Dry, for establishing
LinguistList.
The Victoria A. Fromkin Distinguished Service Prize is going this year
to Anthony Aristar and Helen Aristar-Dry for their extraordinary contributions
to the field of linguistics through LINGUIST LIST. They and their efficient
and effective crew at Eastern Michigan University have led linguists
into the new electronic world. The LSA and its members offer them this
small token of our great appreciation.
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2002 Kathleen Fenton, for her professional contributions
to the editing of the journal Language for the last 30 years.
I [Mark Aronoff] have been asked to put down a few words about the recipient
of this year's Vicki Fromkin award for service to the Society, our outgoing
proofreader, Kate Fenton. Ms. Fenton began working for Language
a little over 30 years ago, after a career at the predecessor of the
National Security Administration, where she learned both Vietnamese
and Indonesian in the early 1950s, and while she was working as Thomas
Sebeok's administrative assistant. As she puts it, Bill Bright was looking
for a proofreader, gave her a test, and she passed. It is difficult
to believe how valuable Ms. Fenton has been to Language without
seeing her work, which has been invisible to all but the editorial staff.
She checks everything from the percentages in tables (they often don't
add up) to the consistency in citing a given work across issues. She
knows every quirk of the prescribed style of every section of Language,
some of which has never been written down and exists only as oral tradition,
presumably since the time of Sapir. She is always pleasant and completely
unflappable. Truly, Kate Fenton has been the soul of Language.
It has been a great honor to work with her. The Fromkin award is a small
way to recognize formally her immeasurable contribution through more
than 30 years of service to the Society.
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2001 Paul Chapin, for his support of colleagues and
the discipline in his role as Linguistics Program Director at NSF for
over 30 years.
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.
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2010 Ethan Poole Since February 2009, Ethan Poole has donated many hours of his time as the volunteer webmaster for the LSA's website, patiently working to improve both the content and navigability of the site. In addition to this important contribution, Ethan also donated the domain name, www.linguisticsociety.org, for use by the LSA. Ethan Poole has saved the LSA a great deal of money during a time of financial hardship for the Society, while also considerably improving our member services and marketing efforts.
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2008 Mary Catherine O'Connor, for exemplary service to the Society
in her capacity as Co-Chair of the Program Committee.
In her four years on the Program Committee,
Cathy oversaw the transition from a brick-and-mortar operation to an electronic one, and a comprehensive
system of expert external reviewers, which has led to a much more informed - and fair - reviewing process.
Cathy has contributed literally hundreds of hours of her time - replete with her characteristic grace and wit -
expecting (and until now receiving) nothing in return. Her service to the Society has been nothing short of
extraordinary and the Society is forever in her debt.
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2007 Kristen Syrett In recognition of her extraordinary contributions to the Society as the Bloch Fellow and as a member of the Information Technology Advisory Group (ITAG), the Executive Committee unanimously voted to award Kristen Syrett the Linguistic Service Award along with a life membership in the Society.
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