The 2009 Linguistic Institute, cosponsored by the LSA and the University of California, Berkeley, was held in Berkeley from July 6 through August 13. It was divided into two three-week sessions, running July 6 through 23 and July 27 through August 13, with six-week classes also running throughout the entire Institute. Attendees included students, affiliates, faculty, and weekend visitors (whom we did not count). There were 345 students in all (238 for all six weeks, 77 for Session 1 only, and 30 for Session 2 only), including local student helpers who took classes in return for Institute work, and there were 164 Affiliates or non-student participants (54 for all six weeks, 79 for Session 1 only, and 31 for Session 2 only). There were 98 faculty teaching courses (21 for all six weeks, 37 for Session 1 only, and 40 for Session 2 only); in all, the Institute had 607 registered participants (313 for all six weeks, 193 for Session 1, and 101 for Session 2 only).

The theme of the 2009 Linguistic Institute was “Linguistic Structure and Language Ecologies”. This was intended to highlight the relation between linguistic structures and the ecologies in which they are embedded, including physical and psychological contexts, demographic and social contexts, and historical and geographic contexts. In selecting courses, lectures, and other academic events, we tried to strike a balance between those emphasizing structural description and analysis and those emphasizing the various aspects of context. The organizing committee responsible for many of the academic and logistical decisions included me as Institute Director, Nick Evans as Associate Director, and several Berkeley colleagues (Larry Hyman, Sharon Inkelas, Keith Johnson, and Eve Sweetser), with a much broader group of colleagues in several Berkeley departments partcipating in the most important academic decisions (e.g. selection of faculty).

We offered 18 six-week courses, mostly on relatively general subjects suitable for advanced undergraduates or beginning graduate students (e.g. Acoustic phonetics, Historical linguistics, Pragmatics), and 72 three-week courses on more specialized subjects, typically in the research areas of the faculty teaching them (e.g. Acquisition of speech production, Linguistic anthropology of language contact, Polarity and scalarity). The three-week courses were evenly divided between Session 1 and Session 2. All classes met twice a week, for two hours per meeting.

Evening plenary lectures were presented by the Collitz Professor (Malcolm Ross), the Hale Professor (Stephen Levinson), the Sapir Professor (Donca Steriade), and three Forum Lecturers (Mark Baker, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Michael Tomasello). The Institute also hosted seven weekend conferences: the Dene Conference, the 33rd Stanford Child Language Research Forum, the summer meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, a specially organized conference “Cyberling 2009: Towards a Cyberinfrastructure for Linguistics”, the biennial meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology, a conference “Frames and Constructions” in honor of Charles J. Fillmore, and the 2009 International Conference on Role and Reference Grammar. In addition, there were a variety of evening workshops on academic and professional topics, as well as organized social events.

We received generous financial support from UC Berkeley, the LSA, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the American Dialect Society. Further details, and links to photos of Institute highlights, can be found on the Institute website.

Andrew Garrett
Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley
Director, 2009 Linguistic Institute