.............................................RESOLUTIONS
...................ADOPTED BY THE ASSEMBLED MEMBERSHIP
...LINGUISTIC ASSOCIATION OF CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
...................7 August 1999, University of Alberta, Edmonton
...................................................................1
........... That LACUS extend appreciation to the University of Alberta for hosting the
splendid twenty-fifth anniversary conference of LACUS and for strengthening the ties of
scholarship and friendship between Canada and the United States to which the
association is dedicated.
........... We thank Gary Prideaux and Lois Stanford of the University of Alberta faculty
for their leadership and planning.
........... To graduate student Ian Wallace go our thanks for coordinating volunteers and
local arrangements, including preparation of the handsome meeting handbooks and
folders.
........... For all sorts of tasks that unobtrusively contributed to the smooth running of the
conference, we thank the following members of the University of Alberta community:
...........Cameron Archer
...........Shaojien Ji
...........Kaori Kabata
...........Shannon McEwan
...........Susanne Mutter
...........Julia Peters
...........Matthias Schiremeier
...........Maite Taboada
...........Wolf Wikeley
...................................................................2
...........That LACUS congratulate and commend with great appreciation Shin Ja Hwang
of SIL and the University of Texas at Arlington and Arle Lommel of Brigham Young
University for editing the LACUS Forum XXV, thus bringing to reality the desire of the
LACUS membership to record the scholarship of the annual forum in a volume of
selected and refereed papers, of high quality and uniform in typography and design.
Thanks go also to those who served in the process of adjudicating the essays: Ruth
Brend, Michael Cummings, Angela Della Volpe, Connie Eble, Sheila Embleton,
Toby Griffen, Sydney Lamb, and William Sullivan (members of the editorial board)
and Fraser Bennett, Michel Paradis, Velma Pickett, Gary Prideaux, Stephen
Straight, and Sandra Thompson.
...................................................................3
........... If the cliche that the devil is in the details has it right, then Ruth Brend is
LACUS' archangel in the strife against the devil. For more than a decade Ruth has been
unrelenting in overcoming millions of details in the service of LACUS. She has been the
local chair for two forums, at Michigan State University in East Lansing and at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has served as Vice President and President of
LACUS, delivering her presidential address in Vancouver in 1994. She served as acting
secretary-treasurer for six months while at the same time serving as Chair of the
Conference Committee. For the past six years Ruth has been Chair of the Conference
Committee--sending out the call for papers, receiving and coordinating the evaluation of
abstracts, communicating with presenters, putting the program together, lining up session
chairs, working with the local arrangements chair, organizing the book exhibit, working
with the Forum printer, mailing Forum volumes, handling shipping and billing for library
and commercial subscribers, and taking care of a legion of devilish details with dispatch.
........... Ruth's careful and caring attention to people and to details at the annual meetings
themselves have had an incalculable effect on the collegial spirit of LACUS. The
frivolous portions of the banquet program--which LACUS regulars have come to expect
and look forward to--are largely the results of Ruth's ingenious efforts to make our
professional friendships fun as well as scholarly.
........... Be it resolved, thus, that Ruth Brend be heretofore called Archangel Ruth of
LACUS in recognition of her overcoming the devil in all the details for us.
.............................................GREETINGS
...........On the occasion of our twenty-fifth anniversary forum at the University of
Alberta, the assembled members of LACUS send affectionate greetings and expressions
of gratitude to Adam Makkai and to Valerie Becker Makkai, the founders of LACUS
who for two decades provided the leadership, stability, and continuity required to bring
into existence and to sustain an international and welcoming association of scholars
devoted to the study of language.
........... In the summer of 1974 while many north and south of the Great Lakes were
preoccupied with the waning days of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of
the President of the United States just days before the first LACUS forum, Adam and
Valerie were devoting themselves to convening at Lake Forest College in Illinois more
than forty linguists from the two nations of North America for an open discussion of
language from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Twenty-five years later, the
organization that they began and nurtured with such devotion for so long is celebrating
its silver anniversary. LACUS now calls together annually about one hundred scholars,
not only from Canada and the United States but increasingly from many other parts of the
world, still remaining true to the founding principle of welcoming a range of perspectives
as vast and as varied as is human language.
........... Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Valerie.
