In an old NCIS episode (“Bikini Wax”, S2 E15, 3/29/05), the chief medical examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard (played by David McCallum) recollects that he’d considered a career in teaching but didn’t find the idea of lecturing on esoteric subjects attractive. Chacun a son goût and all that, but (resisting every digression beckoning me to another profession) I happily signed up to do just that when I was a graduate student at MIT, and went on to appointments at three universities (UIUC, OSU, and Stanford), with visiting teaching gigs at dozens of other institutions over the years.
With the responsibility of teaching, my positions came with a parallel responsibility to engage in research — and to report on that research, not only in writing but also in public presentations, where work in progress can gather useful critiques, and where completed work can be broadcast to new audiences. Face-to-face interaction, in a classroom or in a lecture room, is irreplaceable for scholarly communication, because it’s interactive and can be adjusted on the spot to fit the needs of the moment.
For years now, these interactions haven’t been available to me, so I’ve had to find interactive forms of scholarly communication in different modes: blogging on the internet (inviting commentary) and using social media. More popular and less esoteric, but still in their own ways pedagogical.
Thanks to Ducky Mallard for spurring me to go back to my great big c.v. that has everything in it, to look at the summary of what I did by way of scholarly communication in my previous life. I find it incredibly hard to believe that I was that person, but here’s the evidence.
Courses taught (by course title); a few given many times — but always varying the material — many just once:
Introduction to language, introduction to linguistics, advanced introduction to linguistics, introduction to syntax, introduction to phonology, introduction to morphology, advanced syntax, practicum in linguistics, syntax practicum, language in society, sociolinguistics, dialectology and American dialects, elementary mathematical linguistics, advanced mathematical linguistics, field methods (Welsh, Modern Greek, Telugu), history of linguistics (American structuralism; survey from Plato to modern times; traditional grammar from the 17th to the 20th centuries), first year Sanskrit, structure of English, introductory generalized phrase structure grammar, language / thought / culture, language design seminar, undergraduate honors seminar, sophomore seminar on slips of the tongue, sophomore seminar on usage and prescriptivism, current problems in linguistics, seminar in methodology and argumentation, seminar on casual speech, seminar on the interpenetration of phonology and syntax, seminar on universal phonology, seminar on functionalism, seminar on surface structure constraints, seminar on current problems in phonology, seminar on analysis of linguistic errors, seminar on phonological words and phrases, seminar on understanding and composing sentences in discourse, seminar on readings in morphology, seminar on the interface program, seminar on restatement linguistics, seminar on agreement and government, seminar on constructions, seminar in inflectional morphology, seminar on conceptual foundations of syntax, seminar on conditions in conflict, seminar on style and syntax, seminar on stems, affixes, and shapes in morphology, seminar on syntactic categories, seminar on syntactic variation, seminar on choosing a variant, seminar on linguistics in the comics
Papers delivered (at conferences or on visits to institutions); my final public presentation is boldfaced:
Linguistic Society of America meetings (winter 1964, summer 1966, 1972, 1973, winter 1973, summer 1978, winter 1979, 1981, summer 1982, winter 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997), Fall Joint Computer Conference, Las Vegas (1965), Chicago Linguistic Society (monthly meetings 1966, 1970, 1984; annual regional meetings 1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1992, 1995), CIC South Asian Institute, Illinois (1967), Ohio State (1968, 1988), UCLA Conference on Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar (1969), Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (1969), Iowa (1969), Texas, Austin (1970), Princeton (1971), Linguistic Institute Forum Lectures (1972, 1982, 1999), International Phonology Conference, Austria (1972, 1976, 1980, 1992), CUNY Graduate Center (1973, 1994), Syracuse (1973), Cornell (1973, 2003), Washington (D.C.) Linguistics Club (1973, 1976, 1980, 1995), Pennsylvania (1973, 1994), Edinburgh (1973), Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (1973, 1979, 1982, 1991, 2002), Pittsburgh (1973, 1991), Wisconsin- Milwaukee Symposium (1974, 1986, 1992), Indiana (1974, 1982, 1988, 1992), Michigan State (1975), Kentucky (1975), Conference on Bilingual Education (1975), Sussex (1976, 1977, 1980), Michigan State Univ. Conference on Metatheory (1977), University College London (1977), Linguistics Association of Great Britain (1977, 1991), Lancaster (1977), Cambridge (1977), Essex (1977), Reading (1977), School of Oriental and African Studies, London (1977), Illinois (1979. 1988), Kentucky Foreign Language Conference (1979, 1981, 1994, 1996), Conference on Nature of Syntactic Representations, Brown (1979), UC Santa Cruz (1980, 1982, 1986, 1990), Philosophy of Science Association, Toronto (1980), Kansas (1981), Michigan (1981), Stanford (1981, 1987, 1990, 1994, 1995), Association for Computational Linguistics (1981), Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1982), Univ.of Washington (1982), British Columbia (1982), UC Berkeley (1982, 1987, 1990, 1995), Workshop on Formulaic Language, Maryland (1982), International Congress of Linguists, Tokyo (1982), Wisconsin (1983), SUNY Buffalo (1983, 1988), Colorado (1984), Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (1984, 1986, 1987, 1988), Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1994, 2000, 2005), Purdue (1985), Linguistic Institute summer meetings (1985), Beijing Language Institute (1985), Univ. of Beijing (1985), Relational Grammar Conference (1986), UCLA (1987), USC (1988), Akron (1988), Phonology-Syntax Connection Conference, Stanford CSLI (1988), International Morphology Conference, Austria (1988, 1992), Summer Institute of Linguistics, Grand Forks, ND (1988), Ottawa (1988), Conference on Formal Linguistics, Simon Fraser (1989), Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (1989), Iowa State (1990), Mini Conference on Serial Verbs, OSU (1990), West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (1991, 1996), Talking Heads Conference, Surrey (1991), Conference on Grammatical Foundations of Prosody and Discourse, UC Santa Cruz (1991), Workshop on Clitics, UC Santa Cruz (1991), NYU (1994), Lavender Languages Conference, American Univ. (1994), Deseret Language and Linguistics Conference, Brigham Young Univ. (1995), Arizona State (1995), New Mexico (1995), Frontiers of Research in Morphology workshop, Sussex (1996), UC Davis (1997), Stanford Semantics Fest (2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2019), International Conference on Construction Grammar (2001), American Dialect Society (2005), American Name Society (2005), Stanford Humanities Center (2005), International Pragmatics Association (2015)
Invited discussant at conferences:
La Jolla Syntax Conference (1967), Goals of Linguistics Conference, Univ. of Texas (1969), Conference on Performatives, Conversational Implicatures, and Presuppositions, Univ. of Texas (1973), Conference on Syntactic Questionnaires, Center for Applied Linguistics (1974), LSA Symposium on Sign Language Phonology (1984), Conference on Foundations of Phonology, CSLI, Stanford (1989), Workshop on Construction Grammar, Linguistic Institute, UIUC (1999)
Obviously, I talk too much.
Leave a Reply