Contributors' Column for Summer 2000

Matthew J. Gordon is assistant professor of linguistics in the University of Missouri-Columbia. He completed his doctoral work in 1997 at the University of Michigan. A revised version of his dissertation study on the sound changes known as the Northern Cities Shift is due to appear this year as PADS 84.

Lawrence M. Davis is professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Wichita State University, where he teaches dialectology and other courses in English linguistics. His work with Charles L. Houck and Clive Upton has dealt with the variability of the notion of "dialect area," and his own recent work involves comparability of linguistic atlas data.

Charles L. Houck is professor emeritus of English at Ball State University, where he taught English linguistics, phonetics, history of the English language, and language and culture. He has published several articles in American Speech with Lawrence M. Davis and continues to work on questions of dialect boundaries.

Clive Upton is lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He specializes in dialectology; his early credits includes the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects and the Survey of English Dialects as assistant to Harold Orton, and he is currently involved in planning a new survey of British English varieties. He teaches courses in both present-day and historical English language and is pronunciation consultant to the Oxford English Dictionaries.

Ronald R. Butters is professor of English at Duke University, where he teaches courses in English linguistics. This is the second year of his term as president of the American Dialect Society. His research interests include sociolinguistics, lexicology, lexicography, and language and legal studies.

Jeremy Sugarman is assistant professor of medicine and philosophy at Duke University, where he directs the Center for the Study of Medical Ethics and Humanities. After completing medical school and residency training in internal medicine at Duke University, he earned an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and an M.A. in applied ethics from Georgetown University. He served as senior policy and research analyst for the White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments and as a consultant to the National Bioethics Advisory Committee.

Lyla Kaplan obtained her M.S. in experimental psychology from Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University, combining her interests in individual differences of cognitive and physiological processing with culturally acquired knowledge.

A. J. Meier is associate professor in the M.A. TESOL/Applied Linguistics Program at the University of Northern Iowa. She has published articles in the areas of cross-cultural pragmatics, language and gender, apologizing, and politeness theory. She has taught theoretical and applied linguistics in the United States and Australia.