This summer Cornell will host the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Linguistic Institute, a major event held every other year that draws hundreds of scholars from several disciplines and countries. Although Cornell has a long history in linguistics, this is the first time that Ithaca has been home to the LSA Institute.

"The LSA Institute attracts students and faculty from all over the world to explore a wide range of linguistic topics together," said Sally McConnell-Ginet, director of the 1997 LSA Linguistic Institute and Cornell professor of linguistics. The theme of this year's institute, "Languages in Linguistics," will highlight "the interplay between theorizing about language, on the one hand, and the detailed study of the structure, history and use of particular languages, on the other."

The institute will offer nearly 90 courses. "These include rich offerings in the core areas of linguistics -- phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics and syntax -- as well as many courses in such areas as first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and neurolinguistics," McConnell-Ginet said. Languages to be investigated in these courses, she noted, include well-known ones like Japanese and Korean and Swahili, endangered ones like the Formosan languages in Taiwan and the Khoi-San languages in southern Africa and extinct languages like Anatolian or early languages in the Algonquian family of upstate New York and nearby regions.

Ten institute courses in Chinese linguistics make up the Chinese Linguistic Institute, an "institute within an institute" directed by C.-T. James Huang, former professor of linguistics at Cornell and now professor and chair of linguistics at the University of California at Irvine. Huang and Abigail C. Cohn, Cornell associate professor of linguistics, are the associate directors of the larger institute.

While most institute participants will be graduate students or scholars in linguistics, some will come from related fields, such as anthropology, psychology, speech pathology and computer science. Also, a number of undergraduates will participate both from Cornell and elsewhere. "This unique opportunity for intensive engagement in linguistic study reflects Cornell's commitment to undergraduates interested in the field," said Cohn, Cornell's director of undergraduate studies in linguistics.

In addition to taking institute classes, linguists will gather at Cornell this summer for concurrent workshops and conferences, funded by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Japan Foundation, and Cornell area programs and departments. These events include the 28th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, 13th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, 8th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and workshops on such topics as the teaching of linguistics to non-linguists and on the problems and prospects for women and minorities in linguistics.

Peter Ladefoged, professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the institute's Edward Sapir Professor, and Ives Goddard, curator in anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, is the Hermann and Klara Collitz Professor. Weekly Forum Lectures, open to all, will feature these two named professors and four other distinguished visiting linguists (see next page). Complementing the institute, the weekly public lecture series sponsored by the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions has the theme "Language: Communication and Understanding."

Planning for the LSA Linguistic Institute has been under way at Cornell since 1992, with the pace accelerating this past year. Graduate assistant Lisa Lavoie has prepared the institute catalog and ordered books for courses and T-shirts for souvenirs, while coordinators Sheila Haddad and Beverly McGowan Barnes have corresponded with hundreds of institute applicants and visiting faculty, arranging visas, housing and registration. Cornell linguistics faculty are planning special workshops, asking colleagues to lend offices and preparing the courses they will teach.

The institute not only will bring many distinguished linguists from around the world to Cornell, but will give broader exposure to Cornell's own linguistics program, which the National Research Council ranks as one of the top 10 research-doctorate linguistics program in the nation. Institute faculty include about 20 Cornell professors in linguistics and related fields; among them are Jay H. Jasanoff, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Linguistics, and Tsu-Lin Mei, the Hu Shih Professor of Chinese Literature and Philology.

LSA Institute participants also will have access to Cornell's renowned library holdings of materials related to languages and linguistics, including the Kroch Asia Collection and the Fiske Icelandic Collection. And Cornell boasts the state-of-the-art Noyes Language Learning Center and a well-equipped Phonetics Laboratory, both of which will host tours for institute participants.

Many Cornell units have helped make the 1997 LSA Linguistic Institute a reality, including the College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Provost, Graduate School, Department of Linguistics and Department of Modern Languages. For further information, call (607) 255-4230 or visit .

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BOX:

Forum Lectures will be held Tuesdays, 7:30 p.m., in the auditorium of Baker Hall (Baker 200).

-- June 24: Lila Gleitman, University of Pennsylvania, "The Human Simulation Paradigm: More Surprises about Word Learning"

-- July 1: Peter Ladefoged, UCLA and Edward Sapir Professor, "Phonetic Differences Between Languages"

-- July 8: Ives Goddard, Smithsonian Institution and Hermann and Klara Collitz Professor, "All Things Change: Limitations on the Knowability of Deep Linguistic History"

-- July 15: John J. McCarthy, University of Massachusetts, "Optimality in Phonology and Morphology"

-- July 22 William Ladusaw, University of California at Santa Cruz, "Is This a Compositionality Puzzle Yet?"

-- July 29: Mamoru Saito, Nanzan University, "Syntactic Chains and Quantifier Scope"