New List Maintainer

[Yehuda N. Falk]

Dear LFG'ers,

As you probably know by now, I am the new maintainer of the LFG List. I
would like, as my first act as list maintainer, to thank Mary Dalrymple for
having created the list and having maintained it up until now. Mary now
gets a well-deserved rest from having to approve messages and dealing with
bounced e-mails.

For my second act as list maintainer, I would like to issue a plea
concerning the list. This is supposed to be a *discussion* list, a way for
us to discuss, debate, and argue with each other, in a very open and public
fashion. However, over the past year or so the list has served as little
more than a forum for conference announcements. While there is nothing
wrong in conference announcements, that is not the purpose of the list. One
of the real advantages of the LFG community is its widespread distribution
around the world. This enables us to engage in more varied theorizing than
would be possible if we were concentrated in one place; it brings a certain
freshness of ideas and approaches. Speaking from personal experience,
however, I can also testify to the fact that this global distribution makes
it harder for us to discuss things. The Internet allows us to overcome this
problem: the archive allows us to distribute drafts of papers, and the list
allows us to discuss our half-baked ideas. But they only work if we use
them. Let's start using the list again for discussions.



                             Yehuda N. Falk
                        (until 4 February 2000:)
             Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
                        Stanford, California, USA
                             (permanent:)
        Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
                      Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

                         msyfalk at mscc.huji.ac.il
            until 4 February also: yfalk at leland.stanford.edu
       Personal Web Site    http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/
      Departmental Web Site    http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~english/

"And because,  in all the galaxy, they had found  nothing more precious than
Mind,  they  encouraged  its dawning everywhere.  They became farmers in the
fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped." --Arthur C. Clarke,
2001: A Space Odyssey