Date:  Wed, 21 Dec 1994 10:06:15 -0500

From:  "William A. Kretzschmar, Jr." <billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ATLAS.UGA.EDU>

Subject: Re: your mail



I am pleased to see some more debate about the meeting time for ADS. I

have stayed pretty quiet in recent weeks, since I was part of the

committee that generated the suggestion to have a separate meeting. Now,

however, I think it is time for a comment.



It is simply not "obvious" that LSA is a more powerful or more natural

association for the ADS than is MLA. It *is* pretty obvious, to me at

least, that the journal of the LSA has not published much on dialectology

in recent decades (it used to do so, and Raven McDavid was on the

editorial board as recently as the 1960s). It is also pretty obvious

that half the members responding wanted MLA and not LSA, so arguments

about stronger association with LSA are not manifest on that grounds.



The claim that ADS could attract younger members through LSA also seems

to me to be far less clear than is supposed. In the current LSA program

there is a sociolinguistics session on Sunday AM but little else that I

would go to the meeting for. One of Walt Wolfram's students is giving a

paper in that session, but neither he nor anybody else of the 8 other

speakers listed is currently a member of ADS. This to me argues that LSA

participation is foreign to ADS, and that the people there even in a

related field do not see ADS as interesting or important to their

careers. If there were a few ADS members in the group, I would be all in

favor of linking up with LSA to try to collect the rest---but I just

don't believe that having our meeting with LSA would create a sea-change

in the views of younger scholars.



For what it is worth, the ADS-affiliated session is great this year, on

Saturday afternoon, but I can find no mention of the program or time for

it in the LSA materials and so I don't know how young LSAers would even

know about it.



When I think of the people who now attend ADS meetings, and people like

Dumas and Schneider and are interested but can't or won't come around the

holidays, I think that a meeting at a completely different time would

retain the best part of current attendance and add some others. When the

really important influences on younger scholars, their major professors,

make them understand the value of ADS, then the young folks can come at a

different time, too. In my view, we have little to lose and much to gain

by getting out from under the shadow of the bigger organizations, neither

of which is congenial for at least half our members.



Regards, Bill

******************************************************************************

Bill Kretzschmar         Phone:  706-542-2246

Dept. of English         FAX:   706-542-2181

University of Georgia      Internet: billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hyde.park.uga.edu

Athens, GA 30602-6205      Bitnet:  wakjengl[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga