Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Marianne Mithun is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the 2007 Kenneth Hale Professor at the Linguistic Institute. She received her doctorate from Yale University. Her interests include morphology, syntax, discourse, and their interactions; relations between prosody and syntactic/discourse structures; language contact and language change, particularly the evolution of grammar; typology and universals; and language documentation. Her own field work has been centered primarily on languages indigenous to North America and Austronesia.

Marianne Mithun is giving the Hale Lecture on July 10.

Ken Hale Professorship

At its May 2003 meeting, the LSA Executive Committee established a professorship in field methods for all future LSA Linguistic Institutes as a way to address the strongly felt need in the profession to document endangered languages and work with communities toward their preservation. Named for Ken Hale, a linguist whose dedication to studying and preserving endangered languages is legendary, the Professorship will ensure that linguistics students have access to courses that prepare them to investigate poorly documented languages even if their own institution does not offer them.