LINGUIST List Special Issue: Fund Drive Updates

[LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List Special Issue: Fund Drive Updates

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews: Randall Eggert, U of Utah  
         <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

------------------------- Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:41:13
From:  linguist <linguist at linguistlist.org>
Subject: Barbara Partee: New Ring Master of the Day

We are proud to introduce a new Ring Master of the Day. Barbara Partee
from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, agreed to share her story
on how she got involved into linguistics and we can not wait to have
our subscribers read it!

Barbara Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of
Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. Her research and teaching interests center on formal
semantics and its connections with syntax, pragmatics, and logic, and
on related issues in the philosophy of language and in cognitive
science. Some of her recent publications include:

"Russian genitives, non-referentiality, and the property-type
hypothesis" (In Press)
"Negation, intensionality, and aspect: Interaction with NP semantics"
(In Press)
"Existential sentences, BE, and the Genitive of Negation in Russian"
(2007)
"Compositionality and coercion in semantics: The dynamics of adjective
meaning" (2007)
"Pros and cons of a type-shifting approach to Russian Genitive of
Negation" (2007)

Come to the Circus site and read about Barbara Partee on how she
became a linguist.
http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2008/linguist-of-the-day/Partee.cfm

Oh, and on your way there, do not forget to stop by to DONATE to
LINGUIST at: https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm


------------------------- Message 2 ----------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:04:58
From:  linguist <linguist at linguistlist.org>
Subject: A Summer Internship in Linguistics Seemed Impossible


Dear LINGUIST subscribers, 

As an undergrad, I discovered the wonder that is linguistics, only to
find that (much to my dismay) my university did not have any
opportunities for student research. We did not even have a linguistics
club until late in my sophomore year-needless to say as a mere
undergraduate a summer internship in linguistics seemed impossible.
Out of this seeming oblivion only one institution answered my plea-the
LINGUIST List. The incredible part of this story is that LINGUIST did
not even have an internship program at the time; but instead of
stifling the curiosity of an eager undergrad, an internship program
was begun at LINGUIST, which has included both me and another student,
Evelyn Richter, and has lead to us staying on at LINGUIST as
full-fledged graduate students.

I have been a part of LINGUIST now for more than six months, and have
been a part of many wonderful projects: Multi-Tree, LLMAP, and
GOLDComm. I have also had the opportunity to take part in organizing
conferences, assisting in the writing of the REACT grant, and
corresponding with our community through postings FYI, Notice Board,
and Media. The thing that I have been most personally affected by,
however, is the general sentiment that pervades LINGUIST-not only does
LINGUIST do wonderful things for the linguistic community in the
present, it grows up new linguists from the roots by teaching them how
to communicate, act, and think like linguists. Through our
correspondence with our beloved submitters, we are constantly
surrounded by linguistically-relevant information and we have an
opportunity to interact daily with the global linguistic network.
Working at LINGUIST has shown me that all linguists are in fact
connected in a common endeavour. At LINGUIST, I have the opportunity
to learn the practical skills I will need to thrive (and, more
importantly) give back to this community.

Why contribute to LINGUIST? LINGUIST is serving YOU! And who are you?
A community of like-minded individuals all collaborating for the sake
of science, but ultimately for the sake of humanity-to me, linguistics
is the study of what makes us who we are. It investigates the
mechanism whereby we take the emotions and thoughts universal to all
humans and express these thoughts through a language that is shaped by
our cultural and personal identity. Linguistics is the study of how we
live, create, and articulate this identity. This endeavour is both
tremendous and noble, and requires a real community of linguists that
are linked in a systematic, structured support system. I believe that
LINGUIST is this support system, and more than any other single reason
is why we should contribute to the LINGUIST List.  Every dollar given
to LINGUIST is a dollar donated to sustaining and maintaining the
infrastructure that services the linguistic community at large.
Ultimately, we have to remember that the world gives us back what we
give to it, and we here at LINGUIST can only give back to the
community as much support as it gives to us.

So, please donate: https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Thank you for your support, 

Matthew Lahrman 

------------------------- Message 3 ----------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:32:09
From:  linguist <linguist at linguistlist.org>
Subject: Grad School Challenge: University of Toronto in the Lead


As you read this, University of Toronto is in the lead of the Grad
School Challenge.  They are followed by Eastern Michigan University,
University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan and
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  Together, they have raised a
total of over $2500!

Grad students, faculty and staff at these and other universities are
coming together to contribute to LINGUIST and compete for the
following prizes:

1st Place: 
1. One year subscription to any of John Benjamins 35 journals 
2. One copy of Monica Macaulay, Surviving Linguistics: A Guide for
Graduate Students (2006) Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Press.
3. One copy of Chris Barker, Pauline Jacobson, Direct Compositionality
(2007), Oxford University press

2nd Place: 
1. One copy of Monica Macaulay, Surviving Linguistics: A Guide for
Graduate Students (2006) Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Press.
2. One copy of Robert F. Barsky, The Chomsky Effect A Radical Works
Beyond the Ivory Tower (2007), MIT Press

3rd Place: 
1. One copy of Monica Macaulay, Surviving Linguistics: A Guide for
Graduate Students (2006) Somerville, MA, Cascadilla Press.

4th Place: 
1. One copy of Jean-Louis Dessalles, James Grieve (Translator), Why We
Talk (Hardback) (2007), Oxford University Press

5th Place: 
1. One copy of Irina Nikolaeva, Finiteness (2007), Oxford University
Press


View the latest list of institutions in the Grad School Challenge at: 
http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2008/gradschools/allschools.html

To get tips on how to coordinate the efforts at your school visit:
http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2008/gradschools/group.cfm

Make a donation to help your school climb all the way to the top of
the list at: https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm


------------------------- Message 4 ----------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:50:24
From:  linguist <linguist at linguistlist.org>
Subject: What You Helped Develop: Progress Report on Wikipedia Update Project


Dear readers,

This letter is a progress report on LINGUIST's Wikipedia Update
Project. You may remember that Fund Drive 2007 donors voted to earmark
some funds for a LINGUIST team to look into filling some of the gaps
in linguistics and language articles that appear in Wikipedia. Our
goal was to make Wikipedia an even better resource for our field and
the general public by asking the linguistics community itself to help
improve the reliability of information in the "encyclopedia that
anyone can edit." Our mandate was to get the word out about which
articles needed revision or completion and to issue periodic calls for
volunteers to edit such entries and/or add new entries. Our role was
to serve as a hub for facilitating such updates and to report back to
you on the results of our efforts.

We began our project in earnest in the summer of 2007. LINGUIST's
Wikipedia team logged itself in as a user
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Linguistlist) and merged its
project with the existing WikiProject Linguistics page. We found that
Wikipedia administrators and editors had already identified some 700
articles as "linguistic stubs," flagged as being incomplete or lacking
in some respect-needing fuller content, having content that was
"contested" by some, lacking proper references or citations, or having
missing or empty links. We put these stubs on a "watchlist" to keep
track of what got updated and when. From this large list of stubs, we
then created smaller lists by linguistic subfield-these included
biographic entries of linguists and specific articles in phonetics,
phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics.

We then issued calls for volunteers, one per month for a total of six
through the end of December 2007. Each call included a report on
subscribers who had responded to our calls. Some reported having
edited or created new articles while others promised to edit specific
entries in the future. Our respondents came from all over, as close to
home as Chicago and New York and as far away as Serbia and the West
Indies. All LINGUIST activities on the update project, including the
full text of each call for action, are logged on our user page.

We are pleased to report the following activities concerning
linguistics articles:
- 13 articles were completed or newly created by subscribers
- 12 articles had references added
- 33 links were added to existing articles
- 28 articles were de-stubbed by virtue of being judged
  self-sufficient

The Wikipedia team was able to devote six months to the project, given
a timeframe that was necessarily limited. Because we are also involved
in other LINGUIST projects, we are no longer recruiting participants
for the update project.

The Wikipedia team is extremely grateful to all of you for your
collective interest in the project and especially to those of you who
made specific contributions to Wikipedia entries. Overall, we are
pleased that we were able to perform a public service by calling
attention to the quality of linguistics articles in Wikipedia and
inviting you to join in as active Wikipedians for the greater good of
our discipline.

In closing, we thank you, as always, for being there for us: we
depended crucially on you for this particular project and could not
have done it without you! We hope we were able to a small difference
with this project. Please remember that when you donate to this year's
Fund Drive, you are contributing to similar projects aimed at
providing you with the broadest range of resources in the field of
linguistics.

With best wishes,

The Wikipedia Update Team
Roxana Ma Newman 
Hannah Morales
Luiza Newlin Lukowicz 


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

This Year the LINGUIST List hopes to raise $60,000. This money will go
to help keep the List running by supporting all of our Student Editors
for the coming year.

See below for donation instructions, and don't forget to check out our
Fund Drive 2008 LINGUIST List Circus and join us on our many shows!

http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2008/

There are many ways to donate to LINGUIST!

You can donate right now using our secure credit card form at
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Alternatively you can also pledge right now and pay later. To do so,
go to: https://linguistlist.org/donation/pledge/pledge1.cfm

For all information on donating and pledging, including information on
how to donate by check, money order, or wire transfer, please visit:
http://linguistlist.org/donation/

The LINGUIST List is under the umbrella of Eastern Michigan University
and as such can receive donations through the EMU Foundation, which is
a registered 501(c) Non Profit organization. Our Federal Tax number is
38-6005986. These donations can be offset against your federal and
sometimes your state tax return (U.S. tax payers only). For more
information visit the IRS Web-Site, or contact your financial advisor.

Many companies also offer a gift matching program, such that they will
match any gift you make to a non-profit organization. Normally this
entails your contacting your human resources department and sending us
a form that the EMU Foundation fills in and returns to your
employer. This is generally a simple administrative procedure that
doubles the value of your gift to LINGUIST, without costing you an
extra penny.  Please take a moment to check if your company operates
such a program.

Note: the donors' names are appended to every fund drive message sent
to the main list.  You can also see the list of all donors by clicking
here:
http://linguistlist.org/donation/contributors2008.html

Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!

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