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© 2009 Bastian Drolshagen
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A Short History of LAUDLAUD - the name is a trademark now- has had three different lives, directly associated with three new German universities: Trier, Duisburg and Landau. It all began in 1973, when on a suggestion from René Dirven and Günter Radden, the then dean of ‘Sprach- & Literaturwissenschaft’ of Trier University, Dr. Frühwald (at present Chairman of the German Research Foundation), allotted 2,000 DM for the setting up of L.A.U.T. ( Linguistic Agency University of Trier) as a voluntary agency distributing linguistic preprints and organizing annual symposia (1977-1985).
The second host (1985-1999) was the University of Duisburg, where L.A.U.T was re-baptized as L.A.U.D. and organized as a university-sponsored, legally registered and partly voluntary association with its own board, members, secretary and student assistants, all provided by the University of Duisburg.
In the third phase (2000 - present), the earlier acronym (with full stops) was taken on as a trademark ‘LAUD’ and the organization was distributed over two universities: the LAUD preprints went to Ulrich Schmitz in Essen, and Martin Pütz housed the symposia in Koblenz-Landau (Campus Landau).
The origins of L.A.U.T. and its further evolution must be seen within the larger context of linguistic research done world-wide. In the seventies new means of communication were required in order to spread new linguistic ideas across the linguistic community. L.A.U.T’s foundation as a linguistic clearing-house in 1973 served the purpose of spreading new linguistic ideas in a suffocating ‘generative’ climate. Like its American counterpart, the Indiana Linguistics Club, the non-profit organization L.A.U.T. aimed at the quick dissemination of linguistic research by pre-publishing important linguistic papers. By now LAUD is internationally known and its acronym is strongly associated with linguistic innovation and a wide scope.
The Linguistic Agency has also provided the institutionalized forum for a long series of international linguistic symposia. In the first phase some of the world’s most distinguished scholars were invited to present their linguistic work at the University of Trier, which overnight became known as a place of pilgrimage in modern linguistics. The series of symposia was opened in 1977 with a three-day lecture series by Charles Fillmore, followed by John Searle (1978), William Labov (1979), Edward Keenan (1980), Michael Halliday (1980), Herbert and Eve Clark (1981), David Crystal (1982), George Lakoff (1983), and Ronald Langacker (1984). The historical relevance of the L.A.U.T. symposia is perhaps best illustrated by two remarkable facts. At the first symposium Charles Fillmore buried his first mental child, “Case Grammar”, and cautiously began to carve out his new orientation, now known as “Frame Semantics”, and its twin sister “Construction Grammar”. The two last Trier symposia witnessed the introduction to Europe of “Cognitive Linguistics” by its main proponents, Lakoff and Langacker.
In Duisburg L.A.U.D. became completely different (1985). In this respect, organizations can be compared to organisms: they can only survive if they manage to adapt and change. Apart from the solid infrastructure provided by Duisburg University, the symposia rather became specialized thematic conferences, though still with one or a few main speakers, but with all participants presenting papers of their own. The most important symposia were those on computer linguistics with John Sinclair (1986), pidgin and creole languages with Derek Bickerton and Peter Mühlhäusler (1987), linguistic approaches to artificial intelligence with Yorick Wilks (1988), culminating in 1989 in a third cognitive linguistics symposium, which in retrospect became ICLC 1 ( First International Cognitive Linguistics Conference). It was here that the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA) was founded, the journal Cognitive Linguistics launched, and the new series Cognitive Linguistics Research set up. Further Duisburg symposia increasingly took a multidisciplinary approach: historical linguistics as diachrony in synchrony with Raimo Anttila, Dirk Geeraerts and Dieter Kastovsky (1990), ‘reference’ in a multidisciplinary perspective with John Macnamara and Pierre Swiggers (1991), contact linguistics as a new branch in sociolinguistics and intercultural communication with Michael Clyne, Roger Keesing, and many African scholars (1992), the mental lexicon with Manfred Bierwisch and John Taylor (1993), conditionality with Elizabeth Traugott (1994), the language of emotions with Anna Wierzbicka and Zoltan Kövecses (1995), the cultural context in communication across languages with Edward Hall (1996), metaphor and religious communication with theologians, philosophers and linguists (1997), linguistic relativity with Dan Slobin, John Lucy and Peggy Lee (1998), and finally, inter-religion communication with Christians, Jews and Muslims (1999).
Many of the proceedings of these Duisburg symposia were presented in a new series “ Duisburg Papers on Research in Language and Culture”, edited by René Dirven, Martin Pütz or other Duisburg scholars such as Ulrich Schmitz, Günther Kellermann and Heiner Pürschel. See http://www.uni-landau.de/anglistik/LAUD/proceedings.htm
The diversity of linguistic topics addressed at these symposia reflected the organizers’ broad range of interests in language and culture, as well as their openness towards other people's approaches and fields of research.
The year of the millennium was also the beginning of LAUD’s third life ( 2000). Martin Pütz and Ulrich Schmitz had agreed to continue the work of LAUD as two independent, but closely co-operating organizations, one for the symposia, the other for the LAUD preprints. The latter went to the University of Essen (at present under the name ‘Universität Duisburg-Essen’ after Duisburg’s fusion with Essen) and were incorporated in Ulrich Schmitz’s LINSE internet network of electronic and other linguistic dissemination at http://www.linse.uni-essen.de/linse/index.php
Set up as a new legal body in Essen and thanks to the university’s generous sponsorship, LAUD is thriving and has now nearly reached the respectable number of 800 preprint publications in 30 years. The LAUD symposia as well have continued their success story. In just a few years, Martin Pütz has managed to give Landau an international reputation as a meeting place for high quality scientific exchange, also thanks to the support from Landau University, the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, and especially the peer-refereed evaluations by the reviewers of the German Research Foundation. Also the multi-disciplinary and applied orientations of the symposia were further strengthened, as becomes evident from the main thematic fields discussed. These were: applied cognitive linguistics with John Gumperz, Zoltán Kövecses, and Ron Langacker (2000); critical discourse analysis with Teun van Dijk, Jim Martin, Norman Fairclough, and Ruth Wodak (2002); the sociology of language focussing on language and power with Joshua Fishman, Carol Myers-Scotton, John Edwards, Florian Coulmas, and Ulrich Ammon (2004). The LAUD Symposium 2006 featured, amongst others, John Searle, Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, who is noted for contributions not only to speech act theory, but also to the philosophy of language, especially the philosophy of mind and consciousness. The symposium’s overall theme “Intercultural Pragmatics” was discussed from linguistic, social, cognitive, and interlanguage perspectives. Further plenary speakers were Peter Grundy, Laurence Horn, Istvan Kecskes, Jacob Mey, and Anna Wierzbicka.
In 2008, the 33rd LAUD Symposium was devoted to the theme Cognitive Approaches to Second/Foreign Language Processing. Plenary speakers were Melissa Bowerman, Nick Ellis, Helen Frazer, Susan Gass, Jeannette Littlemore, Peter Robinson, John Taylor and Andrea Tyler. The mental processes and acquisition procedures involved in SLA as well as the pedagogical implications in terms of grammar, lexical expansion and cultural fluency were discussed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. The Proceedings of this conference (i.e. Inside the Learner’s Mind: Cognitive Processing in Second Language Acquisition were edited by Martin Pütz & Laura Sicola) and will presumably be published by March 2010 (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins).
The writers of this Short History of LAUD are of good hope that future LAUD Symposia in Landau will experience the same spirit of success thus continuing to provide an international forum for fruitful linguistic research and academic exchange.
May we finally make our readers acquainted with the two great sons of the little city of Landau, who in a certain way prefigured LAUD’s socio-semantic orientation. One is Thomas Nast (1840-1902), who was born in the military barracks of Landau (where the Department of English of Landau University is now located). Nast was a famous caricaturist and editorial cartoonist and is considered to be the father of American political cartooning, thus evoking the world of ideologies. The second is Michel Jules Alfred Bréal (1832-1915), a French philologist who is often identified as a founder of modern semantics. He is best known for his Essai de sémantique (1897), which gave great impetus to scientific interest in the field of semantics, especially in one of its most crucial dimensions, i.e. polysemy, THE stumbling block for any linguistic theory.
René Dirven
Martin Pütz
Günter Radden