The

Linguistic Society of America 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'', ...

(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

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

founded in December 1924. At the first meeting, the LSA membership elected Hermann Collitz as their first president. Since then, there have been presidencies, with different presidents.

Carl Darling Buck Carl Darling Buck (October 2, 1866 – February 8, 1955), born in Bucksport, Maine, was an American philologist. Biography He graduated from Yale in 1886, was a graduate student there for three years, and studied at the American School of Classica ...

is the only person to serve twice as president, in 1927 and 1937 Under the constitution and bylaws of the organization, the president of the LSA serves for a one-year term. The president serves as chair of the executive committee and has the power to appoint a number of positions subject to executive committee approval. The president serves for one year. A candidate is elected by the membership as vice-president of the LSA which also carries the distinction of president-elect. The candidate serves as vice-president for one year and then assumes the office of president at the end of the annual meeting. The candidate then serves as president for one year. Upon leaving the office, the former president serves a one-year term on the Executive Committee. Should the sitting president prematurely leave office, the previous president completes the term. the president of the LSA is

Laurence 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 ...

List of presidents of the Linguistic Society of America

* 1925: Hermann Collitz * 1926:

Maurice Bloomfield Maurice Bloomfield, Ph.D., LL.D. (February 23, 1855 – June 12, 1928) was an Austrian-born American philologist and Sanskrit scholar. Biography He was born Maurice Blumenfeld in Bielitz ( pl, Bielsko), in what was at that time Austrian Sil ...

* 1927:

* 1928:

Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical ...

* 1929: Charles H. Grandgent * 1930:

Eduard Prokosch Eduard Prokosch (15 May 1876 – 11 August 1938) was an Austrian historical linguist who specialized in Indo-European and, specifically, Proto-Germanic studies. He was the father of Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, Frederic Prokosch and Walther Prokosch ...

* 1931:

Edgar H. 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 Il ...

* 1932: George Melville Bolling * 1933:

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 ...

* 1934:

Franklin Edgerton Franklin Edgerton (July 24, 1885 – December 7, 1963) was an American linguistic scholar. He was Salisbury Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Yale University (1926) and visiting professor at Benares Hindu University (1953–4 ...

* 1935:

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 ...

* 1936:

George T. Flom George Tobias Flom (April 12, 1871 – January 4, 1960) was an American professor of linguistics and author of numerous reference books. Background George Tobias Flom was born in Utica, Dane County, Wisconsin. His grandfather had immigrated to ...

* 1937:

* 1938:

Louis Herbert Gray Louis Herbert Gray, Ph.D. (1875–1955) was an American Orientalist, born at Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from Princeton University in 1896 and from Columbia University (Ph.D., 1900). Gray contributed to the annals of the New York Academy ...

* 1939:

Charles C. Fries Charles Carpenter Fries (November 29, 1887 – December 8, 1967) was an American linguist and language teacher. Fries is considered the creator of the Aural-Oral method (also erroneously called the Audio-Lingual method). He believed, along with ...

* 1940:

Alfred Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first ...

* 1941:

Roland Grubb Kent Roland Grubb Kent (February 24, 1877 – June 27, 1952) was an American educator and a founder of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). He was the first person to translate Marcus Terentius Varro's ''De Lingua Latina'' into English. Ken's 19 ...

* 1942:

Hans Kurath Hans Kurath (13 December 1891 – 2 January 1992) was an American linguist of Austrian origin. He was full professor for English and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The many varieties of regional English that he encountered du ...

* 1943: Fred N. Robinson * 1944:

Kemp Malone Kemp Malone (March 14, 1889 in Minter City, Mississippi – October 13, 1971) was a prolific medievalist, etymologist, philologist, and specialist in Chaucer who was lecturer and then professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins Universit ...

* 1945:

Yuen Ren Chao Yuen Ren Chao (; 3 November 1892 – 25 February 1982), also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born an ...

* 1946: E. Adelaide Hahn * 1947:

Albrecht Goetze Albrecht Ernst Rudolf Goetze (January 11, 1897 – August 15, 1971) was a German-American Hittitologist. Goetze was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1897. His father, Rudolf Goetze, was a psychiatrist. He began studies in Munich in 1915, but left to ...

* 1948:

Hayward Keniston Hayward Keniston (July 5, 1883 – August 10, 1970) was a linguist who served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1948 and as dean of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts from 1945 to 1951. He ...

* 1949: Murray B. Emeneau * 1950:

Einar Haugen Einar Ingvald Haugen (; April 19, 1906 – June 20, 1994) was an American linguist, writer, and professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University. Biography Haugen was born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Norwegian immigrants from t ...

* 1951:

Joshua Whatmough Joshua Whatmough (June 30, 1897April 25, 1964) was a linguist, professor, writer from Rochdale, Lancashire who served as the president of the Linguistics Society of America in 1951. He was also the chairman of the department of linguistics at Harv ...

* 1952: George S. Lane * 1953: Bernard Bloch * 1954:

Charles F. Voegelin Charles Frederick "Carl" Voegelin (January 14, 1906 – May 22, 1986), often cited as C. F. Voegelin, was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was one of the leading authorities on Indigenous languages of North America, specifically the ...

* 1955:

Zellig Harris Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...

* 1956:

Roman Jakobson Roman Osipovich Jakobson (russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н; October 11, 1896Kucera, Henry. 1983. "Roman Jakobson." ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'' 59(4): 871–883. – July 18,W. Freeman Twaddell * 1958:

Henry M. Hoenigswald Henry Max Hoenigswald (17 April 1915 – 16 June 2003) was a German scholar of linguistics, who in 1939 escaped to the United States where he had a long and productive academic career as a scholar of historical linguistics at the University of ...

* 1959:

Harry Hoijer Harry Hoijer (September 6, 1904 – March 11, 1976) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked on primarily Athabaskan languages and culture. He additionally documented the Tonkawa language, which is now extinct. Hoijer's few works make up the ...

* 1960: George L. Trager * 1961:

Kenneth L. Pike Kenneth Lee Pike (June 9, 1912 – December 31, 2000) was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics, the coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic" and the developer of the constructed language ...

* 1962: Albert H. Marckwardt * 1963:

Mary R. Haas Mary Rosamond Haas (January 23, 1910 – May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was elected a ...

* 1964:

Charles Hockett Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralism#Structuralism in linguistics, structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Leonard Bloomfi ...

* 1965:

Yakov Malkiel Yakov Malkiel (July 22, 1914 – April 24, 1998) was a U.S. (Russian-born) Romance etymologist and philologist. His specialty was the development of Latin words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes in modern Romance languages, particularly Spanish. ...

* 1966: J. Milton Cowan * 1967: William G. Moulton * 1968: Eugene A. Nida * 1969: Archibald A. Hill * 1970:

Charles A. Ferguson Charles Albert Ferguson (July 6, 1921 – September 2, 1998) was an American linguist who taught at Stanford University. He was one of the founders of sociolinguistics and is best known for his work on diglossia. The TOEFL test was created under ...

* 1971:

Eric P. Hamp Eric Pratt Hamp (November 16, 1920 – February 17, 2019) was an American linguist widely respected as a leading authority on Indo-European linguistics, with particular interests in Celtic languages and Albanian. Unlike many Indo-Europeanists, wh ...

* 1972: Dwight L. Bolinger * 1973:

Winfred P. Lehmann Winfred Philip Lehmann (June 23, 1916August 1, 2007) was an American linguist who specialized in historical, Germanic, and Indo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at the University of ...

* 1974:

Morris Halle Morris Halle (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-American, Latvian-born Jewish United States, American Linguistics, linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute ...

* 1975:

Thomas A. Sebeok Thomas Albert Sebeok ( hu, Sebők Tamás, ; 1920–2001) was a Hungarian-born American polymath,Cobley, Paul; Deely, John; Kull, Kalevi; Petrilli, Susan (eds.) (2011). Semiotics Continues to Astonish: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs'. ...

* 1976: Rulon S. Wells * 1977:

Joseph H. Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on M ...

* 1978:

Peter Ladefoged Peter Nielsen Ladefoged ( , ; 17 September 1925 – 24 January 2006) was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book ''A Course ...

* 1979:

William Labov William Labov ( ; born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of ...

* 1980:

Ilse Lehiste Ilse Lehiste ( ; 31 January 1922 – 25 December 2010) was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics. Early life Ilse Lehiste finished high school in Tallinn. In 1942 she began her studies at the Faculty of Philosoph ...

* 1981: Fred W. Householder * 1982: Dell H. Hymes * 1983:

Arthur S. Abramson Arthur Seymour Abramson (January 26, 1925 – December 15, 2017) was an American linguist, phonetician, and speech scientist. Abramson was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. He founded the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connect ...

* 1984: Henry R. Kahane * 1985: Victoria A. Fromkin * 1986: Barbara H. Partee * 1987:

Elizabeth C. Traugott Elizabeth Closs Traugott (born April 9, 1939 in the UK) is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, Subjectification (linguistics), subjectifi ...

* 1988:

Calvert Watkins Calvert Watkins ( /ˈwɒtkɪnz/; March 13, 1933 – March 20, 2013) was an American linguist and philologist, known for his book ''How to Kill a Dragon''. He was a professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and after retireme ...

* 1989:

William Bright William O. Bright (August 13, 1928 – October 15, 2006) was an American linguist and toponymist who specialized in Native American and South Asian languages and descriptive linguistics. Biography Bright earned a bachelor's degree in linguist ...

* 1990:

Robert Austerlitz Robert Paul Austerlitz (December 13, 1923 – September 9, 1994) was a noted Romanian-American linguist. Born in Bucharest, he emigrated to the United States in 1938. In June 1950, he received a Master of Arts from Columbia University, where he st ...

* 1991:

Charles J. Fillmore Charles J. Fillmore (August 9, 1929 – February 13, 2014) was an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Fillmore sp ...

* 1992:

Arnold M. Zwicky Arnold M. Zwicky (born September 6, 1940) is a perennial visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University. Early life and education Zwicky was b ...

* 1993:

Lila R. Gleitman Lila Ruth Gleitman (December 10, 1929 – August 8, 2021) was an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholin ...

* 1994:

Kenneth L. Hale Kenneth Locke Hale (August 15, 1934 – October 8, 2001), also known as Ken Hale, was an American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered languages—especially ...

* 1995:

Emmon Bach Emmon Bach (12 June 1929 – 28 November 2014) was an American linguist. He was Professor Emeritus at the Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Stu ...

* 1996:

James D. McCawley James David McCawley (March 30, 1938 – April 10, 1999) was a Scottish-American linguist. Biography McCawley was born James Quillan McCawley, Jr. to Dr. Monica Bateman McCawley (b. 1901), a physician and surgeon, and James Quillan McCawley (b. ...

* 1997:

Janet Dean Fodor Janet Dean Fodor (born 1942) is distinguished professor of linguistics at the City University of New York. Her primary field is psycholinguistics, and her research interests include human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory a ...

* 1998: D. Terence Langendoen * 1999:

Joan Bresnan Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA (born August 22, 1945) is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects (with Ronald Kaplan) of the theoretical framework of lexical functional gramm ...

* 2000:

David Perlmutter David Perlmutter is a Naples, Florida, Naples, Florida–based American celebrity doctor and author. Early life Perlmutter's father Irwin was a Miami neurosurgeon. David Perlmutter received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of M ...

* 2001:

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 ...

* 2002: Frederick J. Newmeyer * 2003:

Ray Jackendoff Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always str ...

* 2004:

Joan Bybee Joan Lea Bybee (previously: Hooper; born 11 February 1945 in New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American linguist and professor emerita at the University of New Mexico. Much of her work concerns grammaticalization, stochastics, modality, morphology, ...

* 2005:

Mark Aronoff Mark Aronoff (), a native of Montreal, Quebec, is a morphologist and distinguished professor at Stony Brook University. The editor of ''Language'' from 1995 to 2001 and president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2005, he has been elect ...

* 2006:

Sally McConnell-Ginet Sally McConnell-Ginet (born 1938) is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Cornell University. She is known for her work on the language of gender and sexuality. Education and career McConnell-Ginet earned degrees in philosophy and mathematics be ...

* 2007:

Stephen R. Anderson Stephen Robert Anderson (born 1943) is an American linguist. He is the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at Yale University and was the 2007 president of the Linguistic Society of America. He received a B.S. in linguistics from ...

* 2008:

Ellen Prince Ellen F. Prince (born Brooklyn, February 29, 1944 – died Philadelphia, October 24, 2010) was an American linguist, known for her work in linguistic pragmatics. Education and career Prince earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania i ...

* 2009:

Sarah Thomason Sarah Grey Thomason (known as "Sally") is an American scholar of linguistics. She is a prolific contributor to academic journals and publications specializing in the field of linguistics, as well as a guest lecturer at different universities arou ...

* 2010: David Lightfoot * 2011: Sandra Chung * 2012:

Keren Rice Keren Rice (born 1949) is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto. Education and career Rice earned her PhD in 1976 from the Univ ...

* 2013: Ellen Kaisse * 2014: Joan Maling * 2015:

John Rickford John Russell Rickford (born September 16, 1949) is a Guyanese–American academic and author. Rickford is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford ...

* 2016: Alice Harris * 2017:

Larry Hyman Larry M. Hyman (born September 26, 1947, in Los Angeles, California) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in phonology and has particular interest in African languages. Educ ...

* 2018:

Penelope Eckert Penelope "Penny" Eckert (born 1942) is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as t ...

* 2019: Brian Joseph * 2020:

Marianne Mithun Marianne Mithun (born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 19 ...

* 2021:

* 2022:

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 ...

Notes

References

* * {{ref end Linguists Lists of people by occupation

List of presidents of the Linguistic Society of America

See also

Notes

References