Linguistic Society of America
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is an organization devoted to the scientific study of human language, and is the major professional society for linguistic researchers in North America and beyond.
The LSA was formed in 1924. Its first president was Hermann Collitz, elected in 1925. The current president of the LSA (2007) is Stephen R. Anderson. A few prominent past presidents are Joseph Greenberg, Calvert Watkins, Morris Halle and Ken Hale.
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[edit] The journal Language
The official journal of the LSA is Language, which publishes articles reporting research in all the major subdisciplines of linguistics, as well as book reviews and a variety of other communications.
Under the editorship of the renowned Yale University linguist Bernard Bloch, Language was the vehicle for publication of many of the important articles of American structural linguistics during the second quarter of the 20th century, and was the journal in which many of the most important subsequent developments in linguistics played themselves out.
The most famous article to appear in Language was the scathing 1959 review by the young Noam Chomsky of the book Verbal Behavior by the behaviorist cognitive psychologist B. F. Skinner. This article, perhaps the most famous book review of the 20th century, argued that Behaviorist psychology, then a dominant paradigm in linguistics (as in psychology at large), had no hope of explaining complex, partly innate phenomena like language. It followed by two years another book review that is almost as famous - the glowingly positive assessment of Chomsky's own 1957 book Syntactic Structures by Robert B. Lees that put Chomsky and his generative grammar on the intellectual map as the successor to American structuralism.
[edit] Annual conference
The LSA holds an annual linguistics conference every year in alternating cities throughout the United States. The annual conference is an important venue for reports on research, and is also the major "job market" where graduate students and others in search of academic positions in linguistics are interviewed.
[edit] Resolutions
The LSA takes a stand on many language-related issues that touch on questions relevant to society and public policy. In 1986, the LSA officially took a stand in opposition to the English-only movement within the United States, arguing that "English-only measures ... are based on misconceptions about the role of a common language in establishing political unity, and ... are inconsistent with basic American traditions of linguistic tolerance." In 1997, an LSA resolution supported the Oakland school-board in its attempt to favor teaching that is sensitive to the distinctive characteristics of African American Vernacular English (the so-called "Ebonics" debate). A 2001 resolution on sign languages "affirm[ed] that sign languages used by deaf communities are full-fledged languages with all the structural characteristics and range of expression of spoken languages" and lent the support of the LSA to a status for sign languages equal to that accorded to other languages in academic and political life.
[edit] Linguistic Institutes
Every two years, the LSA sponsors a Linguistic Institute - a six-week summer school accompanied by a range of conferences and workshops. The classes and meetings draw researchers and graduate students from all over the world. Each Institute features leading faculty in the field, and honors the contributions of particular linguists with their appointment by the LSA to titled chairs at the Institute: the Sapir chair in general linguistics, the Collitz Chair in historical linguistics, and (from 2005) the Ken Hale chair in linguistic fieldwork and the preservation of endangered languages. The 2005 LSA Institute was hosted jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and by Harvard University, with classes in the unique Stata Center. The Sapir chair was held by Richard S. Kayne, the Collitz chair by Craig Melchert, and the Ken Hale chair jointly by the Australian linguists Mary Laughren, Jane Simpson, and David Nash (former students and colleagues of Ken Hale himself).
