Talk:Linguistic Society of America

November 2007
Riverdrop, you added to the LSA article the sentence "A few prominent past presidents are Joseph Greenberg, Calvert Watkins, and Ken Hale." Are you sure you want to go that route? All LSA presidents are chosen because they are considered prominent by some substantial group of linguists. Is past president Morris Halle not equally (or more) prominent? Barbara Partee? I recommend deleting your addition since there is no good reason to single out your group of three over almost any other randomly chosen group. There's already a link on the page to the LSA's own list of past presidents. I could imagine importing that into the Wikipedia article, adding links for those who have articles. Note that I haven't taken any action on this. I'd rather hear your point of view first.

Hi, I'm a member of the LSA executive committee, I'm going to make a few changes to the page, just adding a little more background and deleting some of the less-relevant links. Mcfrank 21:04, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Did some rewriting and editing, tried to differentiate much of the text from the LSA website (some of it was copied from there earlier). Also added back in some past presidents; I think it's very interesting to know some of the famous linguists who have headed the LSA in past. The ones I put in are early linguists like Sapir and Boaz; I think they are uncontroversially known outside of the field (perhaps as opposed to some of those named above) I don't feel strongly about this, but I think it makes the entry more informative and interesting. Mcfrank (talk) 03:02, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Wasn't the first president of the LSA Leonard Bloomfield, its principal founder? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Taketheatrain (talk • contribs) 19:32, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Edit request
I wish to request four edits:

1) Change the lead section to:

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. The LSA publishes the scholarly journal Language, presents peer-reviewed research at its Annual Meeting, and offers advanced training through courses held at its biennial Summer Linguistic Institutes. The LSA also raises awareness of linguistic issues with the public and contributes to policy debates on issues including bilingual education and the preservation of endangered languages.

The LSA has approximately 4,000 members around the world, both inside and outside of academia.

(This more accurately describes the range of activities the LSA supports, the policy issues it engages in, and its membership count. See: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/about, http://www.linguisticsociety.org/public-policy, etc.)

2) Remove the following text from the History section:

as well as communicate linguistic research to a wider audience through its website, annual meetings, biennial summer institutes, and its peer-reviewed, scholarly journals, including Language

(This avoids redundancy with the new lead section. In addition, the section as written implies that the LSA has had a website and summer institutes since its founding in 1924.)

3) Add "the open-access" before the first mention of Semantics & Pragmatics (in Publications)

(Source: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/semantics-and-pragmatics)

4) Change "LSA Journalism Award" to "Linguistics Journalism Award" in the Awards section

(Source: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/about/who-we-are/lsa-awards#lja)

Thank you! RBRLingSocAm (talk) 15:55, 29 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Done. LaMona (talk) 18:07, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

This change was well intentioned but it deleted changes I made after RBRLingSocAm's request. I am going to restore my version, making sure that everything RBRLingSocAm wanted is taken care of. jjbvawv 01:34, 11 January 2016 (UTC)


 * User:Jimbauman, I reverted those edits because they don't meet the style guide for a lead. The lead should not contain statements like "According to Bloom...." Any explanation of that nature should be in the body of the article. The lead is a very brief summary of what is in the article and is used in places like Google as a snippet. So please leave the lead as it is today. Also, on talk pages you must sign your posts with four tilde's. LaMona (talk) 14:55, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks LaMona for your help. I moved my edit into the History section and left the lead alone. jjbvawv 20:58, 12 January 2016 (UTC)