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International Cognitive Linguistics Association |
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From the President
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| in 2010 | 34 | (22.8%) | |
| in 2011 | 82 | (55.0%) | |
| Either option OK | 33 | (22.1%) |
Question 2. After its next meeting, should ICLC meet in odd-numbered (2013, 2015, etc.) or in even-numbered (2012, 2014, etc.) years?
| Odd-numbered years (2013 and on) | 96 | (64.9%) |
| Even-numbered years (2012 and on) | 19 | (12.8%) |
| Either option OK | 33 | (22.3%) |
In accordance with these results, the Board proposes that we wait until 2011 to hold our next conference in Xibg in to provide alternative venues, and I hope that this will preserve the momentum of research in cognitive linguistics until our next meeting in 2011.
Normally the terms of most Board members would expire in July 2009 and we would hold an election for new Board members at our conference. The current members of the Board are willing to continue to serve until elections can be held in 2011, if that is acceptable to the membership. If anyone has concerns or objections, please address them to me.
Laura Janda
President ICLA
Dear Members and Friends of the ICLA,
In the wake of the recent cancellation of the conference in Berkeley the ICLA has several issues that need to be discussed with the membership and potential future conference participants. I am writing to update you on the major issues and how the Board plans to address them. Some of these issues will be addressed by setting up a voting or survey instrument, but because doing so is labor-intensive, we will try to keep the use of such instruments to a minimum. In this letter I address the following issues: membership of the Board, terms of Board members, abstracts submitted for the ICLC 2009, and future schedule for ICLC conferences.
According to the constitution of the ICLA, the organizer of the upcoming conference is an ex-officio member of the Board of the ICLA. Thus it was necessary to ask Eve Sweetser to step down and to invite Thomas Li and Ding Fang Shu, co-organizers of the ICLC 2010, to join the Board.
In the interests of maintaining continuity, it seems prudent to make some adjustments to the terms of our Board members. Normally most Board members serve 2-year terms, which means that we would need to elect new members in July 2009. Given the circumstances, the Board members have volunteered to serve an extra year, until our meeting in 2010. If anyone has objections to this proposal, please send me a message before May 1, 2009 and the Board will decide whether to put it to a vote.
[Update: The Governing Board will serve until the next meeting of the ICLA. Since the membership voted April 27 (see above) to have the conference in 2011 instead of 2010, the Board will serve until the meeting in July 2011.]
ICLA is in possession of the abstracts that had been posted to the site for the ICLC 2009. Unfortunately the files are very numerous, cumbersome, and unconnected. We are working on a survey to allow participants to inform us whether they are willing to present their papers at the ICLC 2010 (in which case those abstracts that were accepted for the ICLC 2009 will be pre-accepted for the conference and not submitted for any further review process). I will send out an announcement inviting participants to submit their survey responses when the survey instrument is ready.
Thanks to the gracious hospitality of our Chinese hosts, it will be possible to hold an ICLC in 2010. The Board believes it is important to hold this conference in 2010 in order to maintain momentum in the organization. If we were to simply beed there are so many conferences and potential conflicts (as well as opportunities to relieve long-standing conflicts) that it is probably impossible for any individual or even any small group (such as our Board) to fully assess the pros and cons of our two options. We are preparing a ballot for members to vote on this issue. I will send out an announcement when this ballot is ready.
I would like to thank all of the members who have written to the listserv, to myself, and to other members of the Board in the past few weeks. Your input has been extremely valuable to me and to the Board in handling the unexpected situation we have found ourselves in. I have tried to answer as many of these messages as possible, but have probably not succeeded in all cases. Our Board members, and particularly Ad Foolen, have also been working very hard to assist our organization during this time. Overall, I have been impressed with the response of our membership, which has been constructive and supportive. An event such as the cancellation of a major conference can be a hazard for an organization. Certainly we have all incurred some damage, but on the whole we have not lost our connections to each other and our sense of group responsibility. This bodes well for the future of the ICLA.
Laura Janda
ICLA President
Dear Members and Friends of ICLA,
Many people have written to us over the past week asking for an explanation for the cancellation of the conference. The ICLA has prepared a preliminary report and and we invite you to examine this document (it follows this letter).
In the meantime, we have worked to secure copies of all the abstracts accepted for the conference. We intend to honor the efforts of our members and colleagues and integrate these presentations into our conference in Xi'an, China, in 2010 [Webmaster note: After an email survey of members, it was decided to leave the conference in China in its originally scheduled year of 2011]. We hope to have more information about this conference for you soon.
Recent events make it necessary to make some minor adjustments in our Board and its terms. We will have a proposal ready for your consideration shortly.
Of course the most important part of the ICLA is its members and their valuable scholarly contributions to Cognitive Linguistics. Your continued support of the ICLA and its intellectual mission are most appreciated.
Laura Janda, ICLA President
March 20, 2009
To ICLA members and all presenters and other intended participants of
ICLC 11:
The 2009 conference of our organization, ICLC 11, was cancelled by the main conference organizer (Eve Sweetser) on March 12, 2009.
As a preliminary report of the views of the ICLA Governing Board on this situation, we offer the following elements for reconstructing the circumstances leading to the cancellation of the conference, based on our notes and records (a definitive report will be delivered at the next ICLA business meeting).
The ICLA Governing Board considers the cause of cancellation to be lack of satisfactory organizational progress on the conference, at a date too late to remedy the failures in essential conference preparations.
The cancellation decision occurred under the following circumstances:
After repeated requests for information about crucial conference steps over a period of more than a year, and verbal assurances by the organizer that specific required steps had been or were about to be carried out, the conference organizer was given a final request by email and telephone on March 5, 2009 for evidence that specific crucial organizational tasks had been performed.
A deadline of March 15 was set for producing this evidence, and the ICLA Board intended to use the response to decide whether the conference would meet the standards of the ICLA so that our organization could continue to endorse the conference.
The response came from the organizer on March 12; it was, however, not the requested evidence, but instead a cancellation of the conference. The reason given was the unavailability of conference rooms and the university's budget crisis.
Some participants have not only lost time in preparing for this conference, but have also lost money by making travel and accommodation arrangements based on conference paper acceptances. The ICLA deeply grieves over the harm done to the participants by this failure of conference organization. We feel that they have a right to know the causes of their loss.
As problems with the conference surfaced over the past months, the ICLA has done its best to help the organizer with information on budgeting and our organization's conference organizing handbook with timeline. The President and Board of the organization attempted to remedy problems in various ways, but could not themselves force changes to be made or actions to be taken.
In the end, communication among scholars runs on trust. For conference organization, it is not usual for any organization to expect an organizer to supply proof and written documentation of every step of a conference's planning. We asked for explanations repeatedly over the course of the last year and received repeated reassurances; we believed that the organizer was addressing problematic issues. But every conference has problematic issues, and the ICLA did not realize that the problems were going to be insurmountable until the conference organizer suddenly cancelled the conference. We were concerned about a number of organizational aspects of the conference, especially lack of information (e.g. on the website), and hence had asked for written evidence of organizational progress; but instead we received notice of cancellation based on the failure of the organizer to secure conference rooms. We had no previous warning that the conference might be cancelled.
Our aim is to make clear what happened with this conference. In the opinion of the ICLA board, it is not accurate to state that the cancellation was due primarily to circumstances and events entirely beyond the organizer's control, rather it was due to a failure of organization. We are aggrieved by the inconvenience and harm this has caused to the prospective participants in the conference.
Sincerely,
ICLA Governing Board
March 20, 2009
Dear members of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association and other friends of Cognitive Linguistics,
I have recently been informed that the preparations for the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Berkeley in 2009 have reached an impasse and it is necessary to cancel the conference. This cancellation has come about despite sustained and laudable efforts to rescue the situation. However, responsibility for organization of the conference rests with the local organizers, who have made the decision to cancel.
We are at present working on an amended conference schedule over the next three years. We hope to honor the efforts of the hundreds of scholars who submitted abstracts for ICLC 2009 by integrating them into a future conference. Our colleagues in China have graciously offered us the possibility of moving the conference originally planned for 2011 to 2010, and our colleagues Sally Rice and John Newman have tentatively agreed to host the conference in Alberta, Canada in 2012. In addition, there are several alternatives for cognitive linguistic conferences this year, among them AFLiCo May 27-29, SALC in Stockholm, June 10-12, and the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics conference, October 15-17 in Prague.
I realize that the cancellation of the ICLC 2009 in Berkeley is terrible news for many of us. The point in sending this message is to inform potential participants as early as possible, before concrete travel plans have been made. It is important that we all work together toward the future of the ICLA. The current situation presents a challenge for our organization, but I believe that our combined efforts will lead to positive solutions. I expect to have more information for you shortly. It will be necessary for us to make some important decisions for the ICLA and I appreciate the support of our members at this time.
Laura Janda
President ICLA
3/14/09
Dear members of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association,
I have three pieces of news to share with you:
The dates for our next conference have now been finalized. ICLC 11 will be held at the University of California at Berkeley, U.S.A., July 28-August 3, 2009, in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America Institute. Eve Sweetser will head the ICLC organizing committee. This information is also available at: ICLC Conferences. Of course we will all look forward to being reunited with our colleagues in Berkeley. [SEE REVISED INFORMATION ABOVE: 3/14/09 and 3/20/09]
Thanks to the efforts of Ad Foolen, with assistance from other members, we now have a functional email list of our membership, making it possible for us to target messages specifically to our members, in keeping with our Constitution (Article 6). Given the dynamic nature of email, no list will ever be definitive, and this list is not entirely without gaps, but is complete enough to serve as a good basis for the future maintenance of such a list. All members can help out by remembering to inform Ad Foolen (a.foolen AT let.ru.nl) of updates in their email addresses. [also: let Ad know if you see any names on Missing members' addresses that you can provide emails for. --Webmaster] Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this achievement.
Suzanne Kemmer and David Tuggy have prepared a description of a voting procedure that we propose using for future ICLA elections; the text is available on the page Single-Transferable-Vote System. This voting procedure is efficient and fair and will help us to streamline our democratic process during meetings. I would like to recommend that members familiarize themselves with this process in advance of our next conference.
Otherwise, I wish you all a lovely Spring (or Fall, for our antipodean members). It always seems to me that Spring is the most challenging semester, perhaps because of all the projects that have to be finished, theses and dissertations defended, etc. by what is for many of us the end of the academic year. Congratulations to all of us for carrying on!
Best wishes,
Laura Janda
[The following letter to members was distributed via the email list of the ICLA. If you are a member but are not on this list, please see ICLA members without email address on file.]
Dear ICLA Members,
I hope that this message finds you all well.
I am pleased to report to you that the Board has received and accepted a proposal to hold the 2011 ICLC in Xi'an, China. [Proposal was attached to letter. If you wish to read it contact Ad Foolen at a.foolen AT let.ru.nl]
This proposal has been formulated in response to a motion approved by the Assembly of members at ICLC 2007 in Krakow. In bringing this motion before the Assembly, the Board recommended that ICLC 2011 be held in China provided that the two Chinese organizations, The China Association of Cognitive Linguistics and China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics, could present a joint proposal for the conference. These two organizations have risen to this challenge and provided their proposal, which the Board has approved, thus giving substance to the motion passed by the membership in July.
I wish to thank all of our members who have worked to help the ICLA plan for the 2011 conference. Thanks are also due to everyone who participated in the discussion concerning a conference in China on the listserv and ICLC 2011 Blog.
Best wishes in 2008!
Laura Janda
On behalf of ICLA I would like to thank Elzbieta Tabakowska and her able team in Krakow for hosting our conference in July 2007. The hospitality of our Polish colleagues made it possible for over 500 of us to gather and exchange ideas and plan for the future of the organization. It would, of course, be impossible to summarize all that took place at the conference; my purpose is merely to highlight the news that is most relevant to ICLA.
First, there was a Jubilee celebration at the Krakow conference, commemorating seminal events in Cognitive Linguistics in the period 1987-89. During this celebratory event, four linguists were honored for their foundational roles in Cognitive Linguistics and in the ICLA: René Dirven, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard Talmy. Laudationen were delivered by: Martin Pütz (for René Dirven), Klaus-Uwe Panther (for George Lakoff), Suzanne Kemmer (for Ronald Langacker), and Eve Sweetser (for Leonard Talmy), followed by a beautiful and mysterious call on a ram's horn, the traditional way of sounding the "Jubilee" in ancient times.
Second, the ICLA Governing Board met in Krakow. Among the many items on the agenda were the following:
Elections were held at the business meeting of the ICLA Assembly, and Maarten Lemmens, David Tuggy, and Arie Verhagen were voted in as our Regular Board Members. (David was re-elected; he served as Regular Board Member in 2005-2007). Ad Foolen is continuing as a member of the Board and our Secretary-Treasurer. Our Ex-Officio Members are Ewa Dabrowska (Editor of Cognitive Linguistics), Klaus-Uwe Panther (Past President of ICLA), and Eve Sweetser (Organizer of the next ICLC in Berkeley in 2009).
A question was raised about whether it is appropriate for ICLA to hold a conference in China given the human rights record of the country. Because we were unable to hold a discussion of this issue at the ICLA Assembly meeting, a blog has been set up at ICLC 2011 Blog , and all members are encouraged to participate in the discussion there. We are particularly eager to receive input on this issue before a final decision on the 2011 conference is taken and will be closing the blog for further discussion as of November 1, 2007, so please get your comments in before that date.
Since the conference, the Board has been busy with a number of issues, summarized briefly here:
I thank all of our members for their contributions to the success of our conference and our organization. I invite all of you to share your ideas concerning these or any other issues with me. I plan to post quarterly updates on news from ICLA, and welcome all suggestions.
Yours truly,
Laura A. Janda
Updated 18 Feb 2010
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