The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a
learned society
A learned society (; also learned academy, scholarly society, or academic association) is an organization that exists to promote an discipline (academia), academic discipline, profession, or a group of related disciplines such as the arts and s ...
for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three
scholarly journals: ''
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
'', the
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
journal ''
Semantics and Pragmatics
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
'', and the open access journal Phonological Data & Analysis. Its annual meetings, held every winter, foster discussion amongst its members through the presentation of peer-reviewed research, as well as conducting official business of the society. Since 1928, the LSA has offered training to linguists through courses held at its biennial Linguistic Institutes held in the summer. The LSA and its 3,600 members work to raise awareness of linguistic issues with the public and contribute to policy debates on issues including
bilingual education
In bilingual education, students are taught in two (or more) languages. It is distinct from learning a second language as a subject because both languages are used for instruction in different content areas like math, science, and history. The t ...
and the preservation of
endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
s.
History
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was founded on 28 December 1924, when about 75 linguists met to select officers, ratify a constitution, and present papers in order to facilitate communication within the field of linguistics.
The foundational members included 31 women, most of whom worked as educators rather than as scholars at research institutions. By 1935, half of the female foundational members had left the society—a rate similar to that of male members—largely due to the professionalization of the field of linguistics that disproportionately affected women as most worked outside of academia.
Before the foundation of the LSA, a number of other similar societies existed including the
American Philological Society and the
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "st ...
, and with the publication of
Sapir's ''Language'' and
Saussure's ''
Course in General Linguistics'' in 1921 and 1922, the field of linguistics began to take shape as an independent discipline.
Though an international discipline, the founders of the LSA had a growing feeling of an American linguistics different from the traditional European topics and methodologies popular at the time.
One of the founding members,
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism ...
, explained the need for and establishment of the society so that the science of language, similar to but separate from other sciences, could build a "professional consciousness.
From the start the LSA focused on establishing the science of linguistics, separate from other fields such as
philology
Philology () is the study of language in oral and writing, written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defin ...
and
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...
.
The founders were characterized as "scientific revolutionaries" as the early scholarship of the society's members contributed to the development of
descriptive linguistics
In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. François & Ponsonnet (2013).
All acad ...
through their rejection of previous linguistic scholarship and methods in favor of new ones. Though when the views of the female members of the society are taken into account, the society was less revolutionary and more diverse in their scholarship.
The LSA published the first edition of its flagship journal, ''
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
'', in March 1925. That same year the society elected its first president,
Hermann Collitz. In 1927, three years after the organization's founding, the LSA was admitted into the
American Council of Learned Societies
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
.
The following year, one of the founding members of the LSA,
Edgar Sturtevant
Edgar Howard Sturtevant (March 7, 1875 – July 1, 1952) was an American linguist.
Biography
Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant and grandson of educator Julian Monson Sturtevant. He studied at I ...
, organized the first of the Linguistic Institutes which the LSA still holds biennially.
As the LSA grew, it began to take on a larger role outside of the professional sphere. During World War II, the LSA helped the United States government with language training programs through its Linguistic Institutes. After the longtime Secretary-Treasurer
Archibald Hill
Archibald Vivian Hill (26 September 1886 – 3 June 1977), known as A. V. Hill, was a British physiologist, one of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research. He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or ...
retired from his position in 1969, the LSA made large changes to its organizational structure to better accommodate its new and growing role. The responsibilities of the secretary-treasurer were expanded and the LSA established a secretariat in Washington, D.C., in order to act as a liaison between the members, federal government, and other professional organizations.
In 1981, the LSA and 9 other professional organizations founded the
Consortium of Social Science Associations
A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for ...
in order to advocate for the governmental support of social science research.
Organizational structure
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is governed by three officers and an executive committee. The three officers—president, vice-president, and secretary-treasurer—are elected by the members of the LSA. The president, elected to a one-year term, serves as the chair of the executive committee, as well as presiding over the annual meeting of the society. The president is first elected to the vice-presidency for a one year-term, which also carries the title of president-elect, and then assumes the presidency at the conclusion of the annual meeting. The secretary-treasurer is nominated by the executive committee and elected by the membership to a five-year term. They serve as the
chief financial officer
The chief financial officer (CFO) is an officer of a company or organization that is assigned the primary responsibility for managing the company's finances, including financial planning, management of financial risks, record-keeping, and financ ...
of the LSA.
Larry Horn
Laurence Robert Horn (born 1945) is an American linguist. He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University with specialties in pragmatics and semantics. He received his doctorate in 1972 from UCLA and for ...
currently serves as president for 2021, with
John Baugh
John Gordon Baugh V (born December 10, 1949) is an American academic and linguist. His main areas of study are sociolinguistics, forensic linguistics, education, and African American language studies. He is currently the Margaret Bush Wilson Prof ...
serving as vice-president. The current secretary-treasurer, having taken office in January 2018, is
Lenore Grenoble
Lenore A. Grenoble is an American linguist specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages, currently the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor and Chair at University of Chicago.
Grenoble earned her Ph.D. in Slavic Lingu ...
who will serve until at least 2023.
The executive committee has ultimate authority over all policy decisions of the LSA. The committee is composed of 12 members, 11 of which have voting privileges. The executive director serves ''
ex officio
An ''ex officio'' member is a member of a body (notably a board, committee, council) who is part of it by virtue of holding another office. The term '' ex officio'' is Latin, meaning literally 'from the office', and the sense intended is 'by right ...
'' without a vote, while the three officers and the previous year's president serve as voting members of the body. The remaining seven positions are specifically elected and held by members of the LSA. One is a student member, elected to a two-year term, while the remaining six are full members elected to three year terms. The elections for the three-year terms are
staggered, with two members elected each year. The executive director is nominated by the executive committee and appointed by the president. They serve as the
chief administrative officer
A chief administrative officer (CAO) is a top-tier executive who supervises the daily operations of an organization and is ultimately responsible for its performance.
Government and non-profit
A CAO is responsible for administrative management of ...
, overseeing the society's application and adherence to policies, and report directly to the executive committee.
Membership in the LSA is open to any person who pays dues and entitles the member to receive the society's flagship publication, ''Language'', as well as submit manuscripts to LSA publications and abstracts to be considered for the annual meeting. Scholars who live outside of the United States may be elected as honorary members of the LSA after being nominated by the executive committee.
There are currently about 3,500 members.
The LSA has a number of standing committees and special-interest groups on various issues in linguistics, including:
*Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP)
*Ethics Committee
*Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL)
*Linguistics in the School Curriculum Committee (LiSC)
*Linguistics in Higher Education Committee (LiHeC)
*Public Relations Committee
*Committee on Public Policy (CoPP)
*Committee on Student Issues and Concerns (COSIAC)
*Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics (COGEL), formerly on the Status of Women in Linguistics (COSWL)
*Committee on Scholarly Communication in Linguistics (COSCIL)
*Committee on LGBTQ+ Issues in Linguistics (COZIL)
*Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group
Meetings
![Wiki Ed at LSA Conference 2016 (7)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Wiki_Ed_at_LSA_Conference_2016_%287%29.jpg)
The first meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) took place on 28 December 1924, at the
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 inter ...
in New York City.
The society met biannually until 1982, meeting once in the summer in conjunction with the Linguistic Institute and once in the winter. Since 1982, the LSA has met annually in the winter. The meetings took place in December until 1990 when the meetings were moved to early January.
The four-day Annual Meeting co-meets with a number of sister organizations such as the
American Dialect Society
The American Dialect Society (ADS), founded in 1889, is a learned society "dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it." The Society ...
, th
American Name Society the
, the
North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics, Society for Computation in Linguistics, and the
Society for Pidgin and Creole Languages. Members of the LSA may submit abstracts to the Program Committee for consideration for talks and poster sessions at the Annual Meeting. The LSA also offers "minicourses" at its annual meeting which offer instruction in various fields such as
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
scripting and statistical methods using
R.
Linguistic Institutes
The LSA holds a four-week biennial Linguistic Institute in the summer which includes talks and coursework on various aspects of linguistics. Considered by the membership to be one of the most important services of the LSA, the institute has helped influence the development of the field through promotion of new directions such as
psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...
and
sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...
.
Each institute features a number of endowed chairs named after prominent linguists: the
Sapir chair in general linguistics, the
Hermann and
Klara H. Collitz Chair in historical linguistics, and since 2005, the
Ken Hale chair in linguistic fieldwork and the preservation of
endangered languages
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
. The newest endowed professorship is named after the late LSA President
Charles Fillmore. The LSA also endows a series of student fellowships, named after prominent linguists and family members. These include fellowships named for
Ken Hale,
James McCawley,
Ivan Sag, and
Julia Bloch. The Bloch fellow also serves a simultaneous appointment to the LSA's executive committee and as the chair of its Student Committee. For the 2019 Institute, the LSA made two additional fellowship awards: the first named after Charles Fillmore, and the second named after Yuki Koroda.
The idea for a Linguistic Institute was first proposed in the spring of 1927 by Reinhold Saleski. The fledgling Society was hesitant at first, but
Edgar Sturtevant
Edgar Howard Sturtevant (March 7, 1875 – July 1, 1952) was an American linguist.
Biography
Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant and grandson of educator Julian Monson Sturtevant. He studied at I ...
was keen on the idea. Sturtevant molded Saleski's idea into a model still used today: a gathering of scholars in conjunction with coursework. The executive committee voted to authorize the first Linguistic Institute, to be held 1928, along with authorization for a second institute in 1929. After the fourth Institute in 1931, the program took a four-year hiatus due to the great depression.
Institutes were held every year concurrently with summer meetings of the LSA until 1988 when, due to increasing costs, the society announced that the Linguistic Institutes would be held every other year. It was at that same time that the summer meeting of the LSA was also discontinued. (See
Falk 2014 for a detailed history of the Linguistic Institutes.)
In addition to the main Linguistic Institute, the LSA also sponsors the Institute for Collaborative Language Research (CoLang), which is held in alternate years from the main Institute. The 2018 CoLang was held at the University of Florida, the 2020 CoLang planned to be held at the University of Montana was postponed, due to COVID-19, the 2022 CoLang will now be held at the University of Montana. The LSA will sponsor a series of student fellowships at this event.
Publications
The LSA publishes two journals of its own, as well as publishing conference proceedings for the Annual Meeting of Phonology, the Annual Meeting of Semantics and Linguistics Theory (SALT), the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society (BLS), and extended conference abstracts from its own Annual Meetings.
The flagship journal of the LSA, ''
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
'', is ranked as one of the top journals in the field. The journal is almost as old as the society itself. First published in March 1925 and edited by
George Melville Bolling,
Aurelio Espinosa Aurelio may refer to:
People Politicians
*Aurelio D. Gonzales Jr. (born 1964), congressman in the Philippines
*Aurélio de Lira Tavares (1905–1998), President of Brazil
*Aurelio Martínez, Honduran politician
*Aurelio Mosquera (1883–1939), Pre ...
, and
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
Sa ...
, the journal published its 92nd volume in 2016 under the editorship of
Gregory Carlson. Dr. Carlson's successor, Andries Coetzee, was elected editor of language in 2016 and assumed office in 2017 for a term of seven years. The journal is partially
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
, allowing articles to be published open access after a year, or immediately for a fee.
Its sister publication, ''Semantics and Pragmatics'' is fully open access. It was founded in 2008 as a co-journal of the eLanguage publishing platform the LSA developed, but became a full journal in its own right in 2013 with the discontinuation of eLanguage. The goal of the new publication was to not only publish articles, but also do so with the advances in open publishing including fast turnaround times and free and open access.
In 2018, the LSA launched a second "sister" journal to Language, titled "Phonological Data and Analysis". A call for submissions was issued at that time, and the first article was published in June 2019.
The LSA publishes a series of conference proceedings, including: Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT), The Annual Meetings in Phonology (AMP), the Berkeley Linguistic Society (through volume 45), and Proceedings of the LSA (formerly Extended Abstracts). All are fully open access publications.
Advocacy
The LSA aims to advance the scientific study of language and accomplishes this goal through advocacy efforts. The society, recognizing its growing role in advocacy, established a secretariat in Washington, D.C., in 1969 to better liaise between its membership and the government.
Around that same time, the LSA began working with other professional organizations to meet and exchange research as part of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). During the
Reagan administration
Ronald Reagan's tenure as the 40th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1981, and ended on January 20, 1989. Reagan, a Republican from California, took office following a landslide victory over D ...
after cuts to social science funding in 1981, the LSA and 9 other professional organizations founded COSSA as an advocacy effort for the funding of social science research.
Advocacy efforts are not only limited to science funding, but larger issues of public policy as well. Over the years, the LSA membership have passed a number of resolutions regarding issues of public policy. In 1987, the LSA officially took a stand against the
English-only movement
The English-only movement, also known as the Official English movement, is a political movement that advocates for the use of only the English language in official United States government operations through the establishment of English as the on ...
in the United States stating 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." Furthering that stance, the membership ratified a statement on linguistic rights in 1996 declaring "the government and people of the United States have a special obligation to enable indigenous peoples to retain their languages and cultures" and declared 7 fundamental linguistic rights including the right "to have their children educated in a manner that affirmatively acknowledges their native language abilities..." which includes the possibility of education in a language other than English. 5 years later, the LSA lent its support for the recognition of sign languages as equal to that of other languages. The resolution, passed in 2001, "affirm
dthat sign languages used by deaf communities are full-fledged languages with all the structural characteristics and range of expression of spoken languages" and urged that sign languages be given the same respect as other languages in academic and political life.
The society has also engaged in more targeted advocacy efforts. 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
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban ...
(the so-called "
Ebonics" debate). More recently, the LSA has advocated for the passage of bills funding revitalization programs for
Native American languages
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large numbe ...
. Their efforts are not limited strictly limited to language however. Citing an interest in promoting diversity (particularly
linguistic diversity
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
), the LSA, along with other professional societies, signed an
amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court case of ''
Fisher v. University of Texas'' stating the importance of
affirmative action policies and urging for their retention.
Awards
The LSA presents a series of awards during its Annual Meeting. The list of awards, their descriptions, and selected holders are listed below:
*Best Paper in ''Language'': awarded to the best paper published in the journal ''Language'' that year; all published papers written by at least one LSA author are eligible.
*Early Career Award: awarded to a member who has made "outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics" early in their career.
*Excellence in Community Linguistics Award: awarded to members of language communities (typically outside the academic sphere of professional linguists) who make "outstanding contributions" for the benefit of their community's language.
*
Kenneth L. Hale Award: named after linguist
Kenneth Hale, this award is given to a member who has done "outstanding work" on the documentation of a particular language or family of languages that is endangered or no longer spoken.
*Leonard Bloomfield Book Award: named after linguist
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism ...
, this award is given to a book that has made an "outstanding contribution of enduring value" to our understanding of language and linguistics.
*Linguistics Service Award: awarded to a member who has performed "distinguished service" for the society
*Linguistics, Language and the Public Award: awarded to a member for work that "effectively increases public awareness and understanding of linguistics and language" in the four years immediately preceding the nomination deadline; works in any medium are eligible and can be considered for multiple cycles.
*Student Abstract Award: awarded to a student who has submitted an abstract to the Annual Meeting.
*
Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award: named after linguist
Victoria Fromkin
Victoria Alexandra Fromkin (; May 16, 1923 – January 19, 2000) was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors, which she applied to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a l ...
, this award is given to a member who has performed "extraordinary service to the discipline and to the Society" throughout their career
*Linguistics Journalism Award: First awarded in 2014, this award is given to "the journalist whose work best represents linguistics" in the prior year.
Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award recipients
Past winners of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award include:
*
Anne Curzan
*
Michael Erard
Michael Erard (born 27 December 1967) is an American non-fiction writer and journalist. He holds an M.A. (linguistics) and a Ph.D. (English) from the University of Texas at Austin.
Notable works Books
*Erard, Michael (2007). ''Um…: Slips, Stumb ...
*
Leanne Hinton
Leanne Hinton (born 28 September 1941) is an American linguist and emerita professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Education and career
Hinton received her PhD in 1977 from UC San Diego, with a dissertation entitle ...
*
Anne H. Charity Hudley
*
Language Log
*
Gretchen McCulloch
Gretchen McCulloch () is a Canadian linguist. On her blog, as well as her podcast Lingthusiasm (which she cohosts with Lauren Gawne) she offers linguistic analysis of online communication such as internet memes, emoji and instant messaging. Sh ...
*
John McWhorter
John Hamilton McWhorter V (; born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist with a specialty in creole languages, sociolects, and Black English. He is currently associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches Amer ...
*
Donna Jo Napoli
Donna Jo Napoli (born February 28, 1948) is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a linguist. She currently is a professor at Swarthmore College teaching Linguistics in all different forms (music, Theater (structure ...
*
North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition
The North American Computational Linguistics Open competition (NACLO), formerly called the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad before January 1, 2020, is a computational linguistics competition for high school students in the United ...
*
Geoffrey Nunberg
Geoffrey Nunberg (June 1, 1945– August 11, 2020) was an American lexical semantician and author. In 2001 he received the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistic Society of America for his contributions to Natio ...
*
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
P ...
*
John R. Rickford
*
Deborah Tannen
Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7, 1945) is an American author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Best known as the author of ''You Just Don't Understand'', she has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at ...
*
Walt Wolfram
Walt Wolfram (; born February 15, 1941) is an American sociolinguist specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English. He was one of the early pioneers in the study of urban African American English through his work in Detroit in 19 ...
See also
*
SIL International
SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...
References
External links
*
*
Past Linguistic Institutes (conferences)*
eLanguage an LSA-affiliated platform for online, open-access linguistics journals
{{Authority control
Organizations established in 1924
1924 establishments in New York City