Martin Joos on the LSA 1924-1950
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Some time ago I obtained a used copy of Martin Joos, Notes on the Development of the Linguistic Society of America, 1924 to 1950. I've now scanned it and made it available for anyone to read (warning: 6.5 MB .pdf).
For me, the most interesting parts are chapter V "Improvising" and chapter VI "Reconverting", which discuss the period of WWII and its immediate aftermath. I've made those two chapters available separately here (1.6 MB .pdf).
The Foreward was written by J.M. Cowan and C.F. Hockett, dated August 1986:
It is important for the reader of this document to know how it came to be written and what function it is intended to serve.
In the early 1970s, when the Executive Committee and the Committee on Publications of the Linguistic Society of America v.ere planning for the observance of its Golden Anniversary, they decided to sponsor the preparation of a history of the Society's first fifty years, to be published as part of the celebration. The task was entrusted to the three living Secretaries, J M. Cowan (who had served from 1940 to 1950), Archibald A. Hill (1951-1969), and Thomas A. Sebeok (1970-1973). Each was asked to survey the period of his tenure; in addition, Cowan, who had learned the craft of the office from the Society's first Secretary, Roland G. Kent (deceased 1952), was to cover Kent's period of service.
At the time, Cowan as just embarking on a new career. He therefore asked his close friend Martin Joos to take on his share of the task, and to that end gave Joos all his files. Joos then did the bulk of the research and writing, but the two conferred repeatedly, Cowan supplying information to which Joos would not otherwise have had access.
Joos and Hill completed their assignments in time for the planned publication, but Sebeok, burdened with other responsibilities, was unable to do so. Since the Society did not wish to bring out an incomplete history, the project was suspended.
Joos continued to rework his segment of the report up to the time of his death on 6 May 1978, making refinements and producing an Index. The latter, as Joos left it, covered also Hill's part of the report, which he had been attempting to dovetail with his own. The form reproduced herewith is the ribbon copy of Joos's last version, except only that, upon Hill's request, the dovetailing has been eliminated and references in the Index to material from Hill's pen have been deleted.
This document is not a history of the Linguistic Society of America and should not be read as one. It is a set of notes and observations on the early career of the Society, made from Martin Joos's always very special and sometimes highly personal stance. Several informed readers of the unpublished document have spotted what they consider to be serious factual errors. But this is not a history; it is only source-materials for one. As the historiographer and historian R. G. Collingwoood tells us, when we find an assertion in such material the proper question is not "Is it true?" but rather "What does it mean? Why was it said?" Taken that way, Joos's treatment sheds interesting light both on the early Linguistic Society and on himself; and both the Society and the man deserve to have that light in the record for posterity.
Let me note in passing how weird it is that OCR systems still don't use a language model, or at least not a decent one. The OCR built into Adobe Acrobat did a pretty good job on this material, but the output still includes things like "Pub1ications" with a digit 1 in place of the letter l, and many other equally idiotic errors.
That's all I have time for this morning, but I'll come back to this interesting document another day.
Ken Miner said,
July 15, 2015 @ 8:19 am
These are much appreciated. In passing, I once noted that LSA membership tripled (at least) after Chomsky and reminisced how linguistics used to be a comfortable little backwater discipline :)
Chris Cooper said,
July 15, 2015 @ 8:31 am
Was the OCR responsible for rendering"Foreword" as "Forward" or was that the LSA's little joke?
[(myl) No, it was my lapsus calami.]
phspaelti said,
July 15, 2015 @ 8:37 am
And I take it, HiU's request is Hill's request.
Q. Pheevr said,
July 15, 2015 @ 11:49 am
Adobe Acrobat certainly seems to think it has language models—at least, when I run OCR, it asks what language the document is in, and I assume that this is because it wants to know which model to apply. (For the types of documents I work with, the presupposition that each one contains only one language is always amusing and frequently false.) It even purports to distinguish between U.S. English and U.K. English, which in principle would pose a bit of a dilemma for those of us working with Canadian English, but if it thinks "v.ere" is more plausible than "were" in either of those varieties, it probably doesn't matter all that much.
Matt said,
July 15, 2015 @ 7:11 pm
It's possible to imagine a script model disguised as a language model ("User says document is in Russian -> Assume Cyrillic script") based on plans to eventually upgrade to an actual language model.
John R. Rickford said,
July 16, 2015 @ 11:58 am
VERY valuable for all of us, Mark, and especially for the LSA. The "Institutes, 1928-31" section beginning on p. 16 is especially interesting (the list of courses is very different from the menu at today's Institutes, for instance), and comes just in time for me to mention it in introducing Dan Jurafsky at the inaugural Fillmore Memorial Lecture at the Chicago Institute tomorrow. THANKS!
john