Date: 17-Mar-2009
From: linguist <linguist linguistlist.org>
Subject: Help Wanted!
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Dear Subscribers: Fund-drives are never something we enjoy, and the current economic climate doesn't help a bit. But the fact is that they are essential to our existence, for without them, LINGUIST could not continue. This is LINGUIST List's eighteenth year of operation, and those of you who are familiar with the United States know that non-profit organizations like Public TV, Public Radio, and, yes, LINGUIST List, have to depend on subscriber donations for a large portion of their operating expenses: government does not typically fund such organizations, no matter the benefits they might bring. LINGUIST List gets a little support from Eastern Michigan University in the form of office space and web-access, and the English department generously funds two graduate assistants, who each work 20 hours a week. But this is nowhere near enough to fund what LINGUIST does. Just think of what LINGUIST does. We post jobs postings, conference and call postings, book postings, book reviews... and each of these require at least two students. The Jobs category alone has had well over 90 postings this year, and a large proportion of these 'routine' postings require email correspondence with the submitters. All of these postings have to be classified by linguistic subfield and subject language, for if they are going to be useful to you they need to be searchable in a way that makes sense to a linguist. Because the material we distribute needs to be made available quickly, we have a 48-hour turnaround time on all postings. But this means that some students have to be available on weekends and holidays. And LINGUIST is a year-round operation. For the year 2008, we posted almost 4,000 issues for you. All our postings are archived so that you can easily search for them and find them. We do much more than posting, however. Our website has thousands of pages which have to be maintained and updated for errors or bad links. These pages contain a great quantity of data. Information on 20,853 linguists is listed, and our publications include 7,594 book notices, 1,702 dissertation abstracts, 2,198 book reviews, 2,567 academic papers, and 590 journals. We list the websites of 553 publishers, 196 professional societies, and maintain a database of 156 linguistics mailing lists and their discussions. Finally, there are our searchable databases of information on more than 7,000 unique languages, their alternate names, and the families to which they belong. This past year, we have built a number of new services. The most prominent is a free abstract submission and review service designed especially for organizers of small conferences. This allows organizers to customize an abstract submission template to fit their needs, and link it to their conference website. You can have your submitters upload abstracts, and review them online. All this we host for free, providing them with a service that normally only the bigger conferences can afford. Another new service we have worked on this past year is our "Student Portal." This is designed to give students interested in linguistics a place where they can find out information on the field. It provides them with a broad range of information on the discipline and shows them how to pursue it as a career: how to find appropriate programs, how to pay for one's education, how to improve one's academic writing and presentation, how to find the right research tools and resources and good career counseling. It even gives information on the best ways to find a job. This area will be available in the next few weeks! A third service made live this year is a facility for advertising linguistic internships. This provides a page that gives you the ability to see the field in which the internship is offered, its location, what it provides, and means of contacting the organization which is offering it. This service features an upload function for students who wish to provide resumes, giving both employers and potential interns an easy place to exchange information. You might wonder why we need so many graduate students to run LINGUIST. There's a really good reason: we do so much! The external grants we've received have been very gratifying: but they are all provided to us to accomplish research goals. None can be used to fund the normal running of the list, nor can they be used to support the students who do the hard work. And it certainly cannot be used for the training the students must receive to reach their full potential. In some ways, it makes matters worse: our grants often build facilities which we must then support all by ourselves. For eighteen years, LINGUIST has been dedicated to providing our email and website services to linguists across the world without cost to the users. We have a commitment to free services, for we believe this will enable our work to be used by anyone who needs it. We are also determined to make these services the very best we can. But these services cost money, and the better they are, the more it costs to support them. Remember: our discipline is only as good as the next generation of linguists. And it is your support that is helping to produce them. And the linguists that the LINGUIST organization produces not only have a good grounding in linguistics, but are also especially sophisticated in the use of language technologies and tools that will ultimately contribute to preserving knowledge of the world's languages and linguistic structures. One of our proudest achievements is the number of LINGUIST assistants who go on to enroll in Ph.D. programs at some of the world's best graduate schools. And it is your money that is giving them the support they need. So, once again, we are asking those of you with the means to do so to contribute to the LINGUIST List 2009 Fund Drive. Every penny goes to the graduate students who run the list and website, for it is they who need it most, and it is they who are the future of our discipline. Please donate at: http://linguistlist.org/donation/donate1.cfm Anthony & Helen
This Year the LINGUIST List hopes to raise $60,000. This money will go to help
keep the List running by supporting all of our Student Editors for the coming year.
See below for donation instructions, and don't forget to check out our Fund Drive
2009 LINGUIST List Restaurant and join us for a delightful treat!
http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2009/
There are many ways to donate to LINGUIST!
You can donate right now using our secure credit card form at
https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm
Alternatively you can also pledge right now and pay later. To do so, go to:
https://linguistlist.org/donation/pledge/pledge1.cfm
For all information on donating and pledging, including information on how to
donate by check, money order, or wire transfer, please visit:
http://linguistlist.org/donate.html
The LINGUIST List is under the umbrella of Eastern Michigan University and as such
can receive donations through the EMU Foundation, which is a registered 501(c) Non
Profit organization. Our Federal Tax number is 38-6005986. These donations can be
offset against your federal and sometimes your state tax return (U.S. tax payers
only). For more information visit the IRS Web-Site, or contact your financial advisor.
Many companies also offer a gift matching program, such that they will match any
gift you make to a non-profit organization. Normally this entails your contacting
your human resources department and sending us a form that the EMU Foundation fills
in and returns to your employer. This is generally a simple administrative procedure
that doubles the value of your gift to LINGUIST, without costing you an extra penny.
Please take a moment to check if your company operates such a program.
Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!
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MAJOR SUPPORTING PUBLISHERS
Brill
http://www.brill.nl
http://www.brillonline.nl
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
http://www.c-s-p.org
Cambridge University Press
http://us.cambridge.org
Cascadilla Press
http://www.cascadilla.com/
Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
http://www.continuumbooks.com
Edinburgh University Press
http://www.eup.ed.ac.uk/
Elsevier Ltd
http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics
http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/
Equinox Publishing Ltd
http://www.equinoxpub.com/
European Language Resources Association - ELRA
http://www.elra.info.
Georgetown University Press
http://www.press.georgetown.edu
Hodder Education
http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk
John Benjamins
http://www.benjamins.com/
http://www.benjamins.nl/
Lincom GmbH
http://www.lincom.eu
www.lincom.eu
MIT Press
http://mitpress.mit.edu/
Mouton de Gruyter
http://www.mouton-publishers.com
Multilingual Matters
http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG
http://www.narr.de/
Oxford University Press
http://www.oup.com/us
http://www.oup.co.uk
Peter Lang AG
http://www.peterlang.com
Rodopi
http://www.rodopi.nl/
http://www.rodopi.nl
Springer
http://www.springer.com
Wiley-Blackwell
www.wiley.com
OTHER SUPPORTING PUBLISHERS
Association of Editors of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics
http://www.fl.ul.pt/revistas/JPL/JPLweb.htm
Graduate Linguistic Students' Association, Umass
http://glsa.hypermart.net/
International Pragmatics Assoc.
http://www.ipra.be
Linguistic Association of Finland
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/
Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke - LOT
http://www.lotpublications.nl/
Pacific Linguistics
http://pacling.anu.edu.au/
SIL International
http://www.ethnologue.com/bookstore.asp
Utrecht institute of Linguistics
http://www-uilots.let.uu.nl/
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