John M. Lawler

    Welcome.  I am Associate Professor of Linguistics in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LS&A), and in the Residential College (RC), both of which are at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor.   (I also teach occasional visiting course at Western Washington University.)   I'm a general practitioner of linguistics, and I have a rather expansive definition of what that includes.

    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 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.

    Here's a link to my listing on the faculty page at the Linguistics Department's site, with a picture of me for anyone intererested, here's one to my Resumé, with live links, and one to my short Bio (ditto), and my Business Card. If you prefer, here's a link to my old home page, which isn't any prettier, but may be familiar at least.

    You can also use this handy Goooooogle form to search my pages:

Search website www.umich.edu/~jlawler  
                             
Classes I Teach at UM (and elsewhere)
In Fall 2008, my last term at UM, I'll once again be teaching Linguistics 210, "Introduction to Linguistic Analysis" (called "Orgo for Language" by my students, I am told), and
Linguistics 102, Section 003, "Questions and Answers; Curiosity and Explanation", a First-Year Seminar on pragmatics and learning.

This is the last time I'll teach either of these classes, since I have negotiated a retirement agreement with the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and am therefore now segueing into retirement, after 37 years on the UM faculty.

In June 2009 I will officially retire from the University, or "Go to join the Emeritooni", as our elders call it. A recent article on this eventuality even made it to page 3 of the Linguistics Department Newsletter. The picture in that article, by the way, was cropped from a couple of pictures of me and my partner Kate taken at the wedding of my son Ian in June 2007.

I am now on "terminal leave" (which is rarely fatal, despite rumors); anyway, I'm only on leave Winter terms; I am teaching at UM Ann Arbor in Fall Term 2008. But from now on I will be spending most of my time in Bellingham WA, getting a rain tan, writing sporadically, travelling, teaching the odd course at Western Washington University, 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:

Things I told you you could find on my Website:

    Book     Software     SIL Linguistics fonts     English Grammar and Usage
    Questions I get asked         Things I've written       Linguistic humor and satire      Phonosemantic research
    Website Stats     Classes I teach     Curriculum Vitae     Retirement
  • Office Phones:

  • Stats:
        As of July 1999, I've completed a whole year at the present address, and can once again compile statistics on site usage. There were about 100,000 hits (file requests) during the last Fiscal Year (7/1/98-6/30/99) total on all the files on my site. This has grown and stabilized to around 10,000 hits per month. Here's a list of the public files on my site with their individual counts, and an Excel chart of the year's information delivery stats.

        I was flabbergasted to find out that, since this site is largely a text site (it sports one JPEG and one GIF, but that's it), the sum total of all these hits is about one and a half GIGAbytes of words, many of them of my manufacture, off the shelf, down the tube, out the door, sopping up bandwidth while hanging ten over the surf, depending on your metaphor choice. As Brooks says Ovid says, "Adde parvum parvo, magnus acervus erit" ('Add little to little and there will be a big heap'). This could serve as well as anything to show that Ovid anticipated the World Wide Web.

        Interestingly, the most frequently requested file last year was something I only helped write (along with several hundred other linguists in the room), the Linguistic Society of America's Unanimous Resolution on the Ebonics flap, with an appended Bibliography of authoritative resources.

    Addendum, 2003
        Here are the stats for Website www.umich.edu/~jlawler/ as of January 1, 2003: 
                       Hits (Individual File Requests)
   -----------------------------------------------------------------
   Total 7/99-12/02  1,050,278    Latest year 1-12/02        445,923
   Mean monthly         21,600    Mean monthly latest year    37,160
   Latest month 12/02   35,504

                        Gigabytes Transferred
   -----------------------------------------------------------------
   Total 7/99-12/02     40.8075   Latest year  1-12/02      14.06483
   Mean monthly          0.7557   Mean monthly latest year   1.17200     
   Latest month 12/02    1.211
        The rate is accelerating, and we're now receiving around a half-million hits a year.
        Here's an Excel graph of the history, for those interested.
    Last change 4-20-08   John Lawler