The 2011 Linguistic Institute took place July 7-August 2 on the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder, with major sponsorship from the Linguistic Society of America and the University of Colorado Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science, the Institute of Cognitive Science, the Division of Continuing Education and Professional Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School. Funding from the Linguistic Society of America helped underwrite the planning and implementation of the Institute, student fellowships and named professorships. The theme of the 2011 Linguistic Institute was Language in the World. Courses focused on interdisciplinary, empirically based approaches that treat language both as an interactional strategy and a product of interaction. A diverse array of courses was provided that emphasized the contributions of data-intensive research to theories of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, phonetics, phonology and their interactions, and provided training in a range of research tools, including acoustic analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation, ethnography, computational and statistical modeling, corpus analysis and various types of fieldwork.

A cluster of Institute courses targeted the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages, offering surveys of methodologies and available tools and resources. In addition to core linguistics courses, Institute 2011 offered courses that combined linguistic theory with perspectives derived from psychology, computer science, anthropology and other related disciplines and that applied linguistic theory to practical endeavors like lexicography, natural language processing and language teaching.

Institute 2011 welcomed 424 students and affiliates, a third of whom were international. Many of these were part-time, so in terms of course credits participation amounted to 279 full student registrations, 26 fully registered student volunteers, and 51 full affiliate registrations, for a total of 356 full registrations--significantly smaller than the Berkeley Institute. Students from Colorado comprised one fourth of the student body, international students comprised one third and US students from outside Colorado comprised the remainder. The curriculum was composed of 76 courses, which are listed on https://verbs.colorado.edu/LSA2011/courses-alphabetical.html. Classes were held for 105 minutes per session twice a week for a total of eight sessions, meeting on either a Monday-Thursday or Tuesday-Friday schedule. Wednesdays were reserved as classfree days for workshops and other activities. Classes were taught by 114 faculty (18 coming from overseas and 6 from CU). Institute Professors included: Collitz Professor: Alice C. Harris, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Edward Sapir Professor: Ivan A. Sag, Stanford University and Ken Hale Professor: Nick Evans, Australian National University. Each gave a traditional evening plenary lecture. All of the plenaries were extremely well-attended and enthusiastically received. Collitz Professor Alice Harris spoke on 'The Diachrony of Case Patterns,’ Sapir Professor Ivan A. Sag gave a lecture entitled 'Sex, Lies, and the English Auxiliary System,’ and Hale Professor Nicholas Evans spoke on 'The Mother of All Relations: Kinship and Syntax.' Three excellent Forum Lecturers traveled to the Institute solely to present a single, evening plenary lecture. Kathryn Bock, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gave a lecture on the psycholinguistics of speech production entitled 'Syntactically Speaking.' Michael Collins, Columbia University, spoke on 'Statistical Models for Natural Language Parsing.’ Finally, Terrence Deacon, University of California, Berkeley, spoke on 'Language Origins: What Co-evolved, What De-volved, and What's Universal.' The Institute also offered two Wednesday evening film events, “We Still Live Here (ÂsNutayuneân),” directed by Anne Makepeace, and “Speaking in Tongues,” directed by Marcia Jarmel and Ken Scheider.

The Institute offered 15 co-located workshops, all of which were one- or two-day events, as well as four evening professionalpreparation workshops for students run by COSIAC. In addition, the Institute offered several skills-based workshops (covering PRAAT, Toolbox/FLEx, ELAN, SketchEngine, etc.). These were run as half-day or full-day sessions, and had a small registration fee. Several such workshops were repeated owing to high demand. Finally, principals from Rosetta Stone, Inc. and Sketch Engine gave presentations on their approaches and their technology, offering free trial software licenses. The Institute hosted an opening reception on July 11 at the Hotel Millennium patio and a closing reception on campus on Aug 2. Participants also took advantage of the numerous hiking and biking trails in Boulder, with many group events organizing themselves spontaneously on our Facebook site. In addition, there were self-organized movie outings and pub gatherings for various subgroups, including sociolinguists and computational linguists. On the final Wednesday of the Institute, there was a field trip to Rocky Mountain National Park with over 150 enthusiastic participants. We would like to express our gratitude to all the wonderful faculty, students and affiliates who made this Institute such an enriching experience.

The Directors: Martha Palmer, Andy Cowell, Laura Michaelis, Beth Levin