Three distinguished scholars from outside the United States were elected Honorary Members of the LSA at the Society's annual Business Meeting earlier this month. Henriëtte de Swart (Utrecht University) , Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), and Rajend “Raj” Mesthrie (University of Cape Town).  Read on for the citations written for the new Honorary Members and read more about LSA Honorary Membership here.

Henriëtte de Swart (Utrecht University), a leading figure in formal semantics, is Professor of French Linguistics and Semantics and a member of the Cognitive Artificial Intelligence Program at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Professor de Swart has served as Director of The Netherlands School of Linguistics (LOT) and of the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (OTS). Professor de Swart is best known for her study of cross-linguistic variation in meaning, most notably in the areas of tense and aspect, the structure of nominals, quantification, and negation. Among the innovative aspects of her research is the development of a methodology called Translation Mining which makes it possible to compare the use of verb forms of different aspects in corpora from a range of languages. While the hallmark of her work is the development of micro-typologies in specific areas of semantic structure, her research extends to the interface of semantics with syntax, with pragmatics, with discourse analysis, with the study of language and cognition, and with the evolution of language. In the latter area, she has analyzed the silent gestures made by adult hearing speakers in describing events as a tool to investigate the origins of word order. Professor de Swart is author or co-author of five books and of numerous articles in journals including Linguistics and Philosophy, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Cognition, Linguistics, and Lingua. She serves on the editorial board of nine journals and was Associate Editor of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory from 2015-18. In 2013 she was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) is a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, as well as being an honorary professor at Leipzig University. One of the world’s leading typologists and comparative linguists, he has made major contributions to the understanding of the cross-linguistic properties of causatives, differential object marking, polysynthesis, serial verbs, possessives, and many other constructions. As co-editor of the World Atlas of Language Structures, he has made available to the linguistic public a treasure trove of data from more than a thousand different languages. As a theoretician, he has put forward important hypotheses regarding coding asymmetries, grammaticalization, and how they interact with facts related to frequency of occurrence. Although he is identified with the usage-based tendency in the field, he has always gone out of his way to engage formal linguists in open discussion on matters related to data and theory. In fact, his blog, Diversity Linguistics Comment, has featured guest postings by a number of well-known generative grammarians. Prof. Haspelmath is undoubtedly the most prominent and influential figure in typological studies in Europe, and to a large extent, elsewhere. He has contributed directly to descriptive work in his Grammar of Lezgian (still perhaps the best available grammar of a Northeast Caucasian language). He has published widely on a vast range of topics in morphological and syntactic typology, and this work is both referenced and respected by linguists of a variety of theoretical persuasions. He has also provided service to the field in his advocacy of Open Access publishing, and in particular in his organization and direction of Language Science Press, which has become the premier open access publisher in our field — largely through his efforts.

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Rajend “Raj” Mesthrie (University of Cape Town) is the foremost sociolinguist documenting and analyzing language contact and change in post-apartheid South Africa. He is Professor of Linguistics in the School of African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, and also holds a National Research Foundation Research Chair (Language, Migration & Social Change). He is a past President of the Southern Africa Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Society, and an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He was organizer and President of the 20th International Congress of Linguists (Cape Town, 2018), the first time this event was held in Africa. Professor Mesthrie’s work emphasizes the significance of sociolinguistics in understanding heritage, culture, and social change in a multilingual society, one in which migration is an important, if not a defining feature. His current research focuses on socio-phonetics, exploring issues of gender and substrate erasure among young, middle-class Black South Africans (with an article in Language in 2017), as well as the urban youth varieties that may be labeled tsotsitaals. He is also undertaking research into the historical roots of Cape Flats English in relation to earlier languages such as those of the Khoi and San, Creole, Portuguese, Afrikaans, and Indonesian and Indian languages. He has published widely in the field of sociolinguistics, with special reference to language contact and variation in South Africa. He is editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics and series editor of Key Topics in Sociolinguistics (both Cambridge UP). Other major publications include A Dictionary of South African Indian English (U Cape Town Press), Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa, and the edited volume Language in South Africa (both Cambridge UP). Among his most recent publications is an article on how COVID19 is discussed in different languages of South Africa.