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A note on LASSO history: addendum to the 2001 Presidential Address.

Article Excerpt
A copy has surfaced of the early 1972 Winfred Lehmann letter that set in motion events leading to the establishment of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO), revealing some new details about the efforts to found LASSO.

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Perhaps the document most immediately responsible for setting in motion the chain of events culminating in the formation of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO) in October, 1972, is a letter written in February of that same year by Winfred Lehmann, then Chair of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. In the Presidential Address to the 30th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, with only indirect documentary support, I said that 'sometime before March 8, 1972, Lehmann sent out a letter to one or more linguists in the southwestern region asking them if they agreed that the Southwest needed a regional linguistic association and asking them to suggest names of linguists in the region who could be contacted to help found such a group' (Boertien 2002:5). A copy of that letter has now surfaced, dug up from his seemingly bottomless files by Lehmann himself, confirming the conjecture and providing several additional interesting facts about the efforts leading up to...

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