FUNKNET administration

[Tom Givon]

Dear FUNKNET subscribers,

As some of you may recall, a few years ago I passed the administrative
responsibility for FUNKNET to Spike Gildea, who at the time was teaching
at Rice University. When in the fall of 2000 Spike moved back to Oregon,
he was originally going to bring FUNKNET back with him to the University
of Oregon. Alas, Spike's responsibilities as Dept. Head at Oregon seem
to have made such an arrangement somewhat too taxing for him.

Fortunately, we have a volunteer who  has stepped in, just in the nick
of time. As some of you may know, Matt (Masayoshi) Shibatani has
accepted a position at the Linguistics Dept. at Rice University. Matt is
only too well known in our community to require much of an introduction,
having received his MA and PhD at Berkeley, taught (and received tenure)
at USC, and then moved back home to Kobe; though for all intent and
purpose he has never really left these shores. His work on causative
constructions, grammatical relations, and voice remains a beacon of
functional and typological scholarship. In an exemplary  spirit of
community service, Matt has agreed to take over the responsibility for
running FUNKNET. This is, needless to say, a most felicitous disposition
of the matter.

On behalf of all of us, I would like to thank Matt for stepping into the
breach, as well as congratulate him on his new professional (ad)venture.
For all FUNKNET business as well as for other matters, he may be reached
at <matt at rice.edu>.

Cheers,  Tomás