let's go

[JANET BING]

I agree that there needs to be some discussion of whether the
possible new organization would be interdisciplinary.  OSCLG is
supposed to be interdisciplinary, but, in fact, the
prevailing discipline is speech.  The Berkeley Women & Lg. Group is
also interdisciplinary (but friendly to linguists).  I favor an
interdisciplinary group, but I can imagine some potential problems.
For example, if there's a conference and people are judging abstracts
or if there's a journal and they're refereeing articles, chances are,
some of those judging won't understand the conventions of other
disciplines.  I recently ran into this when I sent an abstract to a
psychologist who is running a panel I'm interested in being on.  She
hated the abstract because she does empirical work and I don't.  In
her opinion, the paper described wasn't really 'research' as she
defines it..

Are others of you thinking in terms of interdisciplinary?

Janet Bing
Dept. of English
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA 23529-0078
(757) 683-4030
FAX (757) 683-3241