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2005 LSA Institute Linguistic Society of America
 
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Welcome to the 2005 LSA Institute!

My colleagues at Harvard and MIT and I are proud to be hosting an institution which brings together the largest international gathering of language researchers in the world.

The 2005 Institute is the first to be co-hosted and co-sponsored by two different universities.  The strengths of our two faculties have been combined to create a program that we hope you will find both stimulating and enjoyable.

As you will see, our Institute has an unusually large number of co-taught courses.  There are several reasons for this. First of all, in keeping with the theme of the Institute, we have scheduled a number of co-taught 'dialogue' classes (LSA.103, 108, 127, 216, 228, 230, 241), which focus on specific issues about which the instructors hold divergent views. In other cases, co-taught courses have been designed to synthesize the complementary contributions of the instructors.  LSA.306 "Introduction to Morphology," for example, will be co-taught by a phonologist and a syntactician.  In addition, our planning of co-taught courses has been guided by the belief that the larger the community we have in the summer of '05, the more we all stand to gain.  The benefits of participating in an international gathering of this nature come as much from discussions outside the classroom as from formal attendance in courses and lectures.

The Institute will offer courses in many areas of theoretical, experimental, and historical linguistics, including acquisition, computational linguistics, dialectology, language change, morphology, neurolinguistics, phonetics, phonology, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, semantics, and syntax.  There will also be classes with a specific language or language-family orientation, including African American English, Algonquian, American Sign Language, Anatolian, Austronesian, Chinese, Gbe, Indo-European, Irish, Japanese, and Salish.

As you come from around the world to Cambridge in the summer of '05, we hope that you will enjoy our town, which, as the home of two great universities, has been a center of intellectual life since the early days of American history.  Beyond Cambridge, the wider Boston area offers outstanding cultural and recreational possibilities as well.  We hope you will take advantage of it all.

Finally, my colleagues and I want to emphasize that if there is any way in which we can make your stay with us more meaningful, please let us know at any time. We are extremely happy to have you here and look forward to a summer of learning together.


Sabine Iatridou
Professor of Linguistics, MIT
Director of the 2005 LSA Institute