34.1153, Featured Linguist: Sally McConnell-Ginet

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1153. Fri Apr 07 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1153, Featured Linguist: Sally McConnell-Ginet

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Lauren Perkins
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Joshua Sims, Daniel Swanson, Matthew Fort, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Lauren Perkins <lauren at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: 07-Apr-2023
From: Lauren Perkins [lauren at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Sally McConnell-Ginet


Every year as part of our fund drive, the LINGUIST List features a
number of linguists on our blog whose research is of particular
interest to our readers, whose lives as linguists or path to
linguistics has been remarkable, or who’ve impacted and contributed to
the worldwide linguistics community. This week's Featured Linguist is
Sally McConnell-Ginet, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Cornell
University. Sally writes:

An octogenarian, my life and career are overwhelmingly PAST and not
FUTURE tense. But I care about the future. I am connected to some
amazing young people and exciting future-oriented projects, many
reflected in conference announcements, book reviews, job listings,
etc. on Linguist List. Study of philosophy of language and math
started me thinking about natural languages as both like and unlike
formal languages. A childhood in piedmont and western NC with lots of
NYC relatives who didn’t talk like my schoolmates (translating both
directions for Bronx cousins and the locals) and English-major
prescriptivist parents got me puzzling over variation and language
ideologies. But I had two children and a part-time job writing simple
computer programs before I heard about LINGUISTICS.

At 30, I began the U of Rochester’s new linguistics PhD program (my
husband, philosopher Carl Ginet, was on UR’s faculty). Chomsky’s name
and work caught my attention but semantics/pragmatics and the
syntax-semantics mapping really drew me into linguistics, not syntax.
I stumbled onto Richard Montague’s treatment of English as a formal
language; generalized quantifiers and lambda calculus blew my mind.
Without Linguist List to connect me to others with relevant interests
and expertise, I relied on chance encounters (including an amazing NEH
summer seminar of linguists and philosophers: Barbara Partee, Haj
Ross, David Kaplan, Paul Grice, Bob Stalnaker, …). In my dissertation
on English comparative constructions, I began thinking about contexts
for interpretation. My later work on adverbials speculated that
modification helps conversationalists attune to alternative contexts
and interpretations, and I began working on formal analysis of
semantic indeterminacy, vagueness. With then Cornell colleague Gennaro
Chierchia I wrote ‘Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics’,
revised significantly 10 years later.

Early in my career I also began thinking about social dimensions of
language use, spurred by second-wave feminism and growing activist
interest in language and gender. I read sociolinguistics, linguistic
anthropology, social theory, feminist philosophy, and reached out to
colleagues in many disciplines (again, would that Linguist List had
been around to extend my reach in the 1970s and 80s!). And,
importantly, my Cornell students, undergrad and grad, educated me at
least as much as I did them. Gender, I discovered, could not be
separated from sexuality or age, class, race, religion, culture. In
1980, colleagues from Cornell’s Women’s Studies Nelly Furman
(literature) and Ruth Borker (anthropology) and I published an essay
collection, ‘Women and Language in Literature and Society’. In the
early 1990s I began exploring language and gender with Penny Eckert,
whose work was already transforming the study of linguistic variation
and change by explicitly incorporating social meaning. ‘Gender and
Language’ appeared two decades ago, revised substantially a decade
later.

My ‘Words Matter: Meaning and Power,’ looking at ways linguistic
practices enter into social and political arrangements, came out two
years ago. And I’m pondering what’s next. All my work has been
enriched by perspectives of students and colleagues (thank you all!)
and by the increasing diversity of people working in the many
disciplines on which we draw.

FUTURE:
I hope for increased collaboration across linguistic subfields and
between linguistics and other disciplines; continued opening of
linguistics and other academic disciplines to diverse scholars;
improved communication between linguists and wider publics. Linguist
List already furthers these goals but needs all the help we can manage
to ensure its future. If you can, join me in TRIPLING your usual
donation in honor of 33 years of LL or start an annual donating
tradition at whatever level you can afford if you have not given
before but now can!

To take Dr. McConnell-Ginet up on her challenge, you can make a
donation to this year's Fund Drive here:
https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

American Dialect Society/Duke University Press http://dukeupress.edu

Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group) http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Brill http://www.brill.com

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Dictionary Society of North America http://dictionarysociety.com/

Edinburgh University Press www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

Georgetown University Press http://www.press.georgetown.edu

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Linguistic Association of Finland http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Springer Nature http://www.springer.com

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1153
----------------------------------------------------------