Andrew Garrett: Community

with Belén Flores

with Chris Beier

with Dasha Kavitskaya (and Adrian Yu)

with Leanne Hinton

with Lev Michael and Line Mikkelsen

with Sharon Inkelas

I have the privilege of working with the awesome faculty and staff of Berkeley's Department of Linguistics, and learning from legendary emeritus colleagues. I've described some of what I most admire and appreciate about them, below, in encomia it was hard to keep short:

• Amy Rose Deal is an eloquent and startlingly creative writer about language. In what she writes, I admire her ability to draw a straight line from the most particular linguistic facts to the biggest questions about language. From "Nez Perce embedded indexicals" (2014), I learned a new way to think about direct and indirect discourse in some of languages I care most about.
• I think I've learned more about the place where I work from Belén Flores than any other colleague. I'm inspired by her concern for student well-being, her precise understanding of what each one needs. I'm moved when students tell me she made the crucial difference in their time at Berkeley.
• I respect Bill Wang for his commitment to institutions, as an Ohio State Linguistics founder and then the first director of Berkeley's PhonLab. Among many other publications from 1958 through 2016, the classic "Competing changes as a cause of residue" (1969) is always worth rereading for bringing apparent lexically irregular sound changes back under the theoretical spotlight.
• In Chris Beier I admire a research life founded on creating community; she's a role model for clearly seeing the path from human connection to the understanding we all seek. "The social life and sound patterns of Nanti ways of speaking" (2010) presents a humane and insightful view of language use, persuasively linking details of grammar with a specific social contexts.
• I learn from every exposure to Dasha Kavitskaya's integrative approach to phonetics, phonology, dialectology, and sound change. For example, in her very fine "Segmental inventory and the evolution of harmony in Crimean Tatar" (2014), we see how small perturbations in a language's phonemic dossier can yield global transformations in its phonological system.
• I admire Eve Sweetser's creativity, and her originality in combining unexpectedly diverse ingredients. For example, "Borobudur and Chartres: Religious spaces as performative real-space blends" (2013, with Kashmiri Stec) shows how the metaphorical patterns of language can also organize architectural spaces (a famous cathedral, a 9th-century Buddhist temple).
• Gary Holland is a selfless public citizen, having served as Linguistics Head Graduate Adviser and Secretary of the faculty Senate, among other gigs, and directed Berkeley's Celtic Studies Program. I admire him for his metrical edition of the Rig Veda (1995, with Barend Van Nooten), one of the most important and complex texts in any early Indo-European language.
• I admire George Lakoff's devotion to nurturing his students and younger colleagues in the vibrant field of inquiry he created. Among so many other contributions in over half a century of transformative research, "Pragmatics in natural logic" (1974) epitomizes his brilliant sense for what is natural in language and what language as used actually conveys.
• I salute Jim Matisoff for parenting a whole field, Tibeto-Burman linguistics, for example by establishing Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. And among many other truly awesome innovations of linguistic nomenclature — "megalocomparison", "rhinoglottophilia", "sequisyllabic" — he introduced the term "tonogenesis", in (what else?) the classic "Tonogenesis in southeast Asia" (1974).
• It's a pleasure to read John Ohala's "The phonetics of sound change" (1993), a rare paper that's both impactful and clear enough to assign in undergraduate classes. I admire how he changed the landscape of theoretical phonology — his enduring commitment to ideas that were once way out of the "mainstream" and are now central in linguistic debate.
• I admire Karl Zimmer's ongoing quotidian thinking about language and linguistics, and his presence in the life of our academic community. From reading "The morphophonemics of Saussure's 'Cours de linguistique générale'" (1970), about Grassmann's Law, I have a new appreciation of Saussure's view of phonological structure and its relation to modern analytic concerns.
• I prize Keith Johnson's unswerving dedication to bettering the lives of younger colleagues, including students. Unconstrained by conventional boundaries, his research ranges from language documentation to neurolinguistics while remaining perfectly coherent. Keith's obituary of his teacher Ilse Lehiste (2011) is a moving tribute and meditation on our field's history.
• I envy how Larry Hyman loves every moment of linguistics, and finds the heart in any idea or person. Phonologist, syntactician, typologist, generativist, historical linguist, Africanist, tonologist, bon vivant, he is the linguist's linguist. In a seemingly limitless publication dossier, "How concrete is phonology?" (1970) remains a beautiful contribution to a classic debate about phonological abstractness.
• Leanne Hinton makes us proud to be human, to paraphrase Malcolm Margolin, and is more humane than anyone I know. Her books on language revitalization are used everywhere; you should also read "Takic and Yuman: A study in phonological convergence" (1991), an elegant study of Yuman sound changes that have spread into an encroaching language family.
• Lev Michael is a role model for his collaborative engagement with others and his openness to new ideas from any source. With a startlingly original connection between cultural (interactional) practice and the emergence of a grammatical category, "The cultural bases of linguistic form: The development of Nanti quotative evidentials (2015) upends any prospect of a purely structuralist view of language change.
• I admire Line Mikkelsen's passion for learning as the sine qua non of her own teaching and collegial life. With new discoveries about one of the best-studied phenomena in syntax, "VP anaphora and verb-second order in Danish" (2015) inspires me to try to find the pragmatic correlates of complex syntactic patterns in the languages I spend my time with.
• I admire Martine Alexander's unflappable sense of what works, and why. As the impresario of our biggest single show (graduation) she stitches together a flawless event. She's equally inspiring in assembling the giant (myriad-piece!) puzzle of an undergraduate linguistics program.
• I like Paul Kay's grounded awareness of what people actually use linguistic expressions to mean, and his modest way of pinning you down if you don't quite get it. "English subjectless tagged sentences" (2002) is a tour de force that makes empirical discoveries about the syntax and prosody of a colloquial construction, and then shows us all why they matter.
• Paula Floro makes our community function. I wish I could find a fraction of her creativity, effectiveness, equanimity, and wide vision. She truly sees what we need long before we even realize there's something missing. I've learned a lot from her about how to help people be their better selves.
• Peter Jenks is a role model for his generosity to students and unstinting appreciation of their work. I admire his broad engagement; it yields papers like "Mobile object markers in Moro: The role of tone" (2015, with Sharon Rose), whose meticulous argumentation shows how affix position can depend on a surprising aspect of phonology. Did I mention he's a syntactician?
• I like how Rich Rhodes is unafraid of the smallest details, in legacy texts and in lexicography, where many linguists are at sea. In "Alexander Francis Chamberlain and The Language of the Mississaga Indians of Skūgog" (2004), he carefully evaluates the Ojibwe described by Franz Boas's first (1891) PhD student, showing its place in the evolution of modern Ojibwe.
• I respect Robin Lakoff's pellucid writing style, her excellent sense of humor, and her willingness to use linguistics to make the world better. "Language and woman's place" (1973, later a famous book of the same name) kick-started a whole field of linguistics with interesting ideas on every page, an integrative approach to the subject matter, and observations that remain discouragingly relevant today.
• I admire how utterly stress-free Ronald Sprouse seems to be, when each of his projects — maintaining the PhonLab, for example, sustaining the California Language Archive, and supporting those (like me!) who are IT-challenged — is a full-time job as far as I can tell. His calm competence is an inspiration.
• I forget who called Sharon Inkelas the Barack Obama of department chairs, but it's true (no matter who it makes me). She's cool, open-minded, (sometimes wickedly) funny, inevitably prepared, attentive to the common good, and always kind to colleagues. The interplay of morphology and phonology (2014) is so original while covering such key territory that every linguist should want to have it close at hand.
• Sherry Hicks is an inspiring teacher and a colleague who makes everybody happy. I admire her video work, most of all her re-envisioning of Adele's "Someone Like You". You also won't regret watching Sherry's interpretation at SF Pride 2015.
• I respect Susan Lin for her generosity to colleagues and students, her awesome coolth (OED sense 3), and her big-league attentiveness to language. "Gestural reduction, lexical frequency, and sound change: A study of post-vocalic /l/" (2014, with Pam Beddor and Andries Coetzee) is a careful study of the phonetic seeds of /l/ vocalization that makes me doubt some of what I thought I knew about sound change.
• I marvel at Susanne Gahl's ability to create work that never dulls — jewel-like articles that shine from every vantage point. A topical outlier in her oeuvre, "Syllable onsets as a factor in stress rules: The case of Mathimathi revisited" (1996) tells me that the strange world of language is not as outrageous as it could be. There are things languages do not do, and careful analysis tells us what they are.
• I admire Terry Regier's commitment to seeing the big picture in any research project. A great example is "Languages support efficient communication about the environment: Words for snow revisited" (2016, with Alex Carstensen and Charles Kemp), which takes up the "Eskimo words for snow" matter with a surprisingly innovative "big data" methodology.