Special Issue: Fund Drive News + Contest!

Mon Mar 30 18:53:55 UTC 2009

To: linglite at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Special Issue: Fund Drive News + Contest!

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U. <[log in to unmask]>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <[log in to
	        unmask]>

Reviews: Randall Eggert, U. of Utah
         <[log in to unmask]>

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

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The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, and
donations from subscribers and publishers.
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------------------------- Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:01:32
From:  linguist <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Special Offer from Elsevier Ltd

Dear Subscribers,

Elsevier Ltd is bringing a fantastic contest to you!
Elsevier is offering a "One year online subscriptions
to the Elsevier Linguistics journal of the winner's
choice"! If you are the person who donates the most
between 12pm and 6pm (Eastern Time), you will receive
this incredible prize!

The list of journal titles includes:

- Assessing Writing
- Computers and Composition
- English for Specific Purposes
- Journal of Communication Disorders
- Journal of English for Academic Purposes
- Journal of Fluency Disorders
- Journal of Phonetics
- Journal of Pragmatics
- Journal of Second Language Writing
- Language and Communication
- Language Sciences
- Lingua
- Linguistics and Education
- System

Come to the LL site and donate now in order to participate
in this contest. We will track the donations between this
period of time and contact the lucky winner! This is a prize
you can not resist!

Donate now at:
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

The LINGUIST Crew

------------------------- Message 2 ----------------------------------
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:51:36
From:  linguist <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: 2 Good Reasons to Donate

Dear LINGUIST Subscribers,

The LINGUIST List Fund Drive isn't going well this year.  
Normally we collect about $2,000 per day in the first 10
days of the Drive; this year, after 13 days of earnest
effort on the part of our students, we have collected
only $16,400 - that's almost $10,000 less than what we need
just to be on par with previous years' donation.
Of course, we expected some difficulty.  With the economic
news so grim, it is very hard to donate to anything with
wholehearted enthusiasm.   

This year, when I contemplate donating to the causes
that I usually support, I hesitate, feeling that I need
a really good reason,  just to counter all the voices,
internal and external,  that seem to be urging frugality.  
So let me try to give you a good reason-actually, two good
reasons-for donating to LINGUIST List.   The first is
investment in  your own professional life,  and the second
is investment in the kind of students who represent the
future of the discipline.

1. Profession:  for nearly 20 years now, LL has brought you
up-to-date information about linguistics calls, conferences,
jobs, books, articles, dissertations, projects, funding
sources, and so on and on.  It has provided services
like NoticeBoard, Ask-A-Linguist, hosting and archiving of
linguistics discussion lists, hosting of language-related
websites and of the OLAC search engine, and-new this year
-- the Student Internships Register , the Student Portal,
and Easy Abs, a free abstracts submission and review facility. 

Now, of course, there are ways we could improve, and perhaps
there are other sites that perform  one or more of these
functions better than we do.  But there is an advantage to
having a central clearinghouse for information relating to
what I might call the 'administrative infrastructure' of
the discipline.  If LL were to disappear this year because
of lack of support, either it would have to be reinvented
later somewhere else or busy professionals like yourself
would have to get used to collecting such information on
your own from scattered sources.   I am old enough to
remember the bad old days when we all wasted an inordinate
amount of time just finding out what jobs and conferences
were available.   And it cost money as well as time
(remember paying for a printed jobs bulletin?). 

LINGUIST now does all that information-gathering for you. 
We have already undertaken the publicity efforts needed to
make employers, editors, and organizers centralize their
posting;  we have developed the systems necessary to
categorize their announcements by subfield and language,
and to cross-reference people, information, and services.
Via two NSF-funded projects, we are trying to provide you
with innovative mapping and genetic tree interfaces to all
our language-relevant information.  Why let LINGUIST die
and later start over somewhere else?  Doesn't it make 'good
investment sense' to help sustain LINGUIST instead?

2. Students: for nearly 20 years, LL has also been supporting
outstanding students who go on to become practicing linguists. 
Eastern Michigan University, where LL is situated, has no
doctoral program in linguistics, but-thanks to your donations
and support - in the past 18 years, LINGUIST has been able to
fund the M.A. degrees of over 100 highly talented students
from all over the world.  Over half of these 'LL alums' have
entered a top Ph.D. program in linguistics either in the US
or abroad.  But many -if not most - of these would never
have been able to advance past the B.A., had it not been for
your support.  

These students are bright, responsible, eager to learn, and
extraordinarily dedicated.  If you haven't done so already,
read some of the letters that they have been writing during
Fund Drive.  You will see the diversity of their backgrounds,
how much they feel they are learning at LL, how intent they
are on doing the best job possible, and how grateful they
are for the support that is making their education possible.
See, for example,
http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-1089.html#1
http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-1031.html#1
http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-1059.html#1
http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-1035.html#1
http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-995.html#1

Please support them again this year. 

I called my two reasons for donating to LINGUIST 'investments'
because that is what I think they are:  money donated now will
yield future returns.  But nowhere is that clearer to me than
in the contribution you can make to the support of these great
linguistics students.  Unlike other investments, this one is a
sure thing:  if you fund their M.A.'s , they will go on to
advanced degrees or careers in linguistics; and the discipline
will profit for many  years to come.

https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Yours sincerely,

-Helen

Helen Aristar-Dry
LINGUIST Moderator
Prof. of Linguistics, EMU

------------------------- Message 3 ----------------------------------
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:00:06
From:  linguist <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Grad School Challenge Update

Dear Subscribers,

The race is on! University of Toronto is challenging all other
schools in the grad school challenge! The University of
Toronto has been in the lead of the overall challenge for
four days in row! The University of Michigan and the University
of Washington has been close by the whole time.

Donate now and make your school the leader!
http://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Today, the University of Wisconsin-Madison took a huge jump and
it is now third and pushing the University of Washington to
fourth place! Will it be able to move up to second place?

We have a new leader in the Asia region! Tohoku University
took the first place today.  Tianjin Foreign Studies University
also took a new spot placing second. Will Saga National
University be able to move back up?

The Universitat de Barcelona has also been in the first place
for the European region for a few days. Oxford University
Phonetics Laboratory,  Swansea University, University of
Geneva, University of Oxford, Vrije University Brussels,
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS and University of Oxford
are all in second place. Will one of these schools be able to
move up to take first place and destitute the Universitat
de Barcelona?

In the US East region, the University of Michigan is taking
the lead at this time. However, the University of Wisconsin-Madison
moved up close and may take the lead very shortly. Will the
student and faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison
be able to get together and make this possible?

The University of Washington is ahead of all other schools in
the US West region.  Arizona State University, University of
Arizona, University of California, Berkeley and Stanford
University are all close by trying to move up the list! Which
one of these schools will be able to make it to the top?

There has been a tie in the Pacific region for almost a week
now between Griffith University and Monash University. Are there
other institutions in that region who want to put an end to
this? Take the lead! Donate now to make your school the leader!

In the Middle East region, Bar-Ilan University is ahead of
all other institutions. University of Cyprus, Tel-Aviv University
and American University of Kuwait are in second, third and fourth
place respectively. Will this order last?

In teh African region we only have one participating institution:
University of Botswana. Which school will raise to the occasion
and take the lead in this group?

Remember, all regions will have two winners. The top schools in
each region will receive a prize! Remember these are prizes
for your department! You will be able to share this prize, as
you got together to make your school a winner!

Grad School challenge coordinators: remember that you could
also win a prize if your school donated the most in each of the
fund drive weeks! Last week, the coordinator for the University
of Toronto got this prize! Will it be you next week?

Donate now and help your school get to the top!
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

The LINGUIST Crew

------------------------- Message 4 ----------------------------------
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:29:06
From:  linguist <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Without Your Donations We Can't Go On!

Dear Linguists,

I have joined the LINGUIST team two years ago.  I came from
Shanghai, China ten years ago and studied in M.S. of Computer
Information System in EM.  The economy of U.S is really bad,
especially for Michigan, so I appreciate so much for LINGUIST
to give me this job opportunity, so I can buy food and raise
my kid.

As a full time programmer for LINGUIST, I am been involved in
different projects.  This year the new project I am involved in
is the FIELD project.  This project is a web based tool for field
linguists to insert their language data into a fully searchable
online database. Another project is the conference customization
facility, EasyAbs, which is designed for small conferences to
submit abstracts on line and let reviews review the abstracts.
The facility has already gone live and totally free for any user.
Right now we are developing version 2 of this facility after
receiving user's feed back.

LINGUIST is non-profit organization. It provides free service for
all linguist users in the world. However, without your donation
we can not keep running our free service. Your donations will
mean a lot for us. Your contribution will help us to continually
run another year to provide more service for linguist users and
give us the chance to work here. Please donate today:

https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Thanks again, for your continued support and donations,

Yours sincerely,
Li (Lily) Zheng