John M. Lawler

  Welcome.   I am a linguist, a general practitioner of linguistics, and I have a rather expansive definition of what that includes.

  Over the last 4 years I've been participating in the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange, where I answer questions about English grammar, usage, etymology, and so on. As I say on my user profile there, I enjoy answering questions. I was surprised to realize recently that I've accumulated over a thousand answers on English grammar and usage.

Here are all of them, sortable by various criteria. In the upper right corner of the page is a search box, with "user:15299" in it; you can use this to search all my answers for any word or phrase; as you can see, I repeat myself a lot. I've resumed emitting answers there, and am now working on linking them together into an online introduction to English syntax. Insha'allah.

  A New page -- New as of April Fools' Eve, 2012, at any rate; this is a Beta version, subject to change in the future, of which this is the first and only notice -- about doing something to ameliorate the "anxious cluelessness" about language that is the end product of modern Anglophone education.

  A fairly recent page created for the 2011 NorWesCon 34 Fantasy/Science Fiction convention. It's got my credentials, the handouts from my talks there, and some other links to the stuff I talked about. And a link to my NorWesCon talks from 2010.

  Another fairly recent page, consisting of teaching materials in historical linguistics and etymology, from my UM freshman class A World of Words, and my HyperCard stack (remember HyperCard?) of the same name. Graphics, lists, exercises, poetry, texts, etc. about Greek, Latin, English, and Proto-Indo-European.

  And here's a newly reorganized page showing all of the files hosted here for my colleague Haj Ross, including Ross 1967 (the complete MIT dissertation: 24 Mbytes, 500 pages, downloadable by chapter), his other papers on both syntax and poesy, and Selected Short Subjects, in electronic form, newly compiled by recent popularity.

  As of June 1, 2009, I am retired from the faculty of the Linguistics Department and of the Residential College, at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor, and have "gone to join the Emeritooni", as our Departmental elders call it. I was on the faculty at Michigan from Fall 1972 thru Spring 2009, for a total of 37 years of professoring. I'm still alive and healthy, however, living in Bellingham, WA, and I still teach the odd visiting course at Western Washington University there. This web site and my email address are permanent (or at least as permanent as I am), so feel free to use them to contact me, and drop in if you're in the area (here's a link to my business card, with local contact information).

  One of the things I did to prepare for retirement was to finally get around to scanning all of my publications that weren't already in electronic form and putting the lot on the Web. There are a couple more I still have to find copies of, but pretty much everything I've ever written is now available, free (with a money-back guarantee, subject to the usual disclaimers) right here. Enjoy (if possible).

  From now on I will be spending most of my time in Bellingham WA, getting a rain tan, writing sporadically, travelling when we can (photos of our recent trip to Hawai'i here) and publishing or reading papers on this and that, here or there, now and then, masha'allah. While I'm on the subject, here are a couple of bitmaps of pictures that I've taken of Bellingham and the Northwest, suitable for screen wallpaper:

  I've moved URLs several times, so if you've gotten here unexpectedly by trying to find the LSA Ebonics Resolution, the Language and Gender Syllabi, the Chomskybot, my grammar pages, monosyllable database, Gödel, Escher, Bach, A World of Words, Grimm's Law, Haj Ross's papers, or anything else that's not my home page, then look below and, insha'allah, you'll probably find what you're looking for. Some of these pages are linked behind the scenes, in various ways and to varying degrees. Some navigation aids are provided, but what you make of it is up to you, as usual (in case you're confused -- or even if you're not -- here's a list of my most-requested pages over the last ten years).


Things I told you you could find on my Website:

    Book     Software     SIL Linguistics fonts     English Grammar and Usage     Phonosemantics     Coursepacks from Intro Ling     Fillmore's Santa Cruz Deixis Lectures
    Questions I get asked         Things I've written recently       Linguistic humor and satire     Valhallacon linguistic resources
    Website Stats     Classes I teach     Curriculum Vitae     Publications     Retirement     Haj Ross's Papers
Last change 11/09/15   John Lawler