Polls will be open from September 1 through November 6, 2021.

The LSA Constitution, Article IV, Section 2, states:

The Nominating Committee shall nominate one person for the position of Vice President and two for each vacant position on the Executive Committee. A report from the Nominating Committee and the slate of nominees with statements from the candidates shall be sent to the members at least seven months in advance of the Annual Meeting. If six months before the Annual Meeting, ten or more members have separately and in writing nominated any additional individual member for any position, and that member agrees to be presented as a candidate for the position in question, then that name shall be added to the ballot submitted to the members. This ballot shall be sent not less than four months in advance of the Annual Meeting. A quorum shall consist of those replies which have been received by the Secretary-Treasurer two months in advance of the date of the Annual Meeting.

The Slate of Candidates for 2022 is available below.  Any additional nominations must be received, according to the procedures described above, no later than July 6, 2021. Please note that an additional nomination was received as of the official deadline and in accordance with the procedures above. That member's name has been added to the slate appearing below.

A series of proposed amendments to the LSA Constitution and Bylaws are also outlined below. Selected amendments originated with the staff and Executive Committee of the LSA. One amendment originated with a group of 25+ LSA members.

Votes may be cast online between September 1 and November 6, 2021.  Only current LSA members are eligible to vote.  Please log in to the LSA website prior to clicking on the voting link.

The Search Committee for the Secretary-Treasurer position has submitted the following candidate to stand for election in September-November 2021:

• Frederick J. Newmeyer (University of Washington, University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University)

The Nominating Committee has submitted the following slate of members to stand for election in September-November 2021:

Vice President/President-Elect:

• Anthony C. Woodbury (University of Texas at Austin)

Executive Committee (two at-large seats):

• Andrea Berez-Kroeker (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)​
• Suzanne Flynn (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Carmen Jany (California State University, San Bernardino)
• Rafael Orozco (Louisiana State University) 
• David Pesetsky (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

A brief biographical summary and statement for each candidate is included below. 

Rationale and Text of the Proposed Amendments to the LSA Constitution 

Rationale and Text of the Proposed Amendments to the LSA Bylaws

Biographical Summaries and Statements

Candidate for Secretary-Treasurer

 

Frederick J. Newmeyer (University of Washington, University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University)

Frederick J. (‘Fritz’) Newmeyer is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Washington and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. His entire teaching career was spent at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was Department Chair from 1990 to 2000. He has had visiting positions at a number of institutions, including University College London, LaTrobe University, and the University of São Paulo.

Newmeyer is the author of seven books, editor or co-editor of eight more, and has published well over a hundred articles. He has several parallel professional interests: the foundations of generative grammar, the interplay between formal explanation and functional explanation in linguistics, language typology, the evolution of language, and the history of linguistics, in particular the development of American linguistics in the past century. His books Language Form and Language Function and Possible and Probable Languages attempt to reconcile the superficially opposed formal and functional approaches to language. Linguistic Theory in America traces the origins and development of generative grammar from the 1950s to the 1980s. Newmeyer now has a contract with Oxford University Press to write a book entitled American Linguistics in Transition: From Post-Bloomfieldian Structuralism to Generative Grammar. Much of the book is devoted to the history of the LSA, making copious reference to hitherto unpublished archived correspondence between leading members of the Society from the 1940s to the 1970s. His edited work Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, published in 1988, includes a volume containing chapters written by the leading sociolinguists and ethnolinguists of the time. He was also one of the principal editors of the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory between 1988 and 2002.

Newmeyer joined the LSA in 1966 and has been an active member since then. He has already served as Secretary-Treasurer (from 1989 to 1994) and was President in 2002. He has also taught at two summer Institutes, in 1982 and 1999. In addition, he has served on the Nominating Committee, the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award Committee, and as LSA delegate to the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes. He was the principal organizer of the events around the 90^th anniversary of the LSA in 2014.

Statement

When I joined the LSA it was for all practical purposes a closed-in ‘men’s club’. Things have changed dramatically in a positive direction in the years since then, both in terms of the representation of the diverse areas of the field of linguistics and the diversity of the membership. However, there is still work to be done. I fully support the Long Range Strategic Plan, which affirms that the LSA ‘values inclusiveness in the linguistics profession in terms of demographics, workplace setting, and subdisciplinary specialization’, ‘ethical and civil conduct in all spheres of the linguistics profession’, and ‘global linguistic diversity, supporting the documentation, revitalization and promotion of languages’. I also support the efforts, which have accelerated in recent years, to increase public awareness of the importance of the field of linguistics, as well as to increase efforts to incorporate the results of our field into the school curriculum.

The Secretary-Treasurer is the Chief Financial Officer of the LSA. In that regard, my particular goal is to increase the Society’s revenue, while reducing expenses. That is a particularly important task in today’s climate, where the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a more precarious employment situation for many of our colleagues, with the resultant diminished ability to maintain membership in professional organizations. In 1990 as Secretary-Treasurer I oversaw a successful fund-raising activity; I have a few in mind for the next few years. Along these lines, I look forward to working closely with the Executive Director and her staff at the LSA Secretariat in Washington, DC.

Candidate for Vice President/President-Elect (1-year term, with two additional years on the Executive Committee as President and Past President)

 

Anthony C. Woodbury (University of Texas at Austin​)

Anthony C. Woodbury is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Jesse H. Jones Regents Professorship in Liberal Arts. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago (1975) and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley (1981), supervised by Mary R. Haas. He has taught in the UT Linguistics Department since 1980, and served as its chair (1998-2006; 2014-2015). He received the UT Graduate School’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award (2008) and the UT College of Liberal Arts Harry Ransom Award for Teaching Excellence (2016). Woodbury's research focuses mainly on the indigenous languages of the Americas: their documentation, their preservation, and their linguistic, humanistic, intellectual, scientific, and cultural importance. Since 2003, he has been engaged, along with current and former students, in the documentation and description of Chatino, an Otomanguean language group of Oaxaca, Mexico, supported by grants from the Endangered Language Documentation Programme and NSF. Earlier, he worked with Yupik-Inuit-Aleut languages of Alaska, especially Cup’ik. Themes in his writing have included tone and prosody; morphology, syntax, and historical linguistics; ethnopoetics; speech play and verbal art; and language documentation, preservation, and justice under conditions of language shift. Works of his include ‘Verb inflection in the Chatino languages: The separate life cycles of prefixal vs. tonal conjugational classes’ (Amerindia 2019), ‘A Humanities of Speaking: Franz Boas and the continuing centrality of texts’ (with Patience Epps & Anthony Webster, IJAL, 2017), ‘Finding a way into a family of tone languages: The story and methods of the Chatino Language Documentation Project’ (with Emiliana Cruz, LD&C 2014), ‘Documenting rhetorical, aesthetic, and expressive loss in language shift’ (CUP, 1998), ‘Meaningful phonological processes: a consideration of Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo prosody’ (Lg. 1987), and Cev’armiut qanemciit qulirait=llu: Eskimo narratives and tales from Chevak, Alaska (U. Alaska P.). Since 2001 he has been a co-director of the digital Archive for Indigenous Languages of Latin America (www.ailla.utexas.org), supported in part by grants from NSF and NEH.  He has served on the LSA Executive Committee (1992-4), chaired the LSA Committee on Endangered Language and their Preservation (1997-8), served as Ken Hale Professor at the 2015 LSA Linguistic Summer Institute, and was elected President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (2005) and Fellow of the LSA (2017). Since 2000, Woodbury has particularly focused his University and extramural teaching on Ph.D. and other training in linguistics for activist speaker-linguists in southern Mexico and elsewhere.

Statement

I feel incredibly honored and grateful to the Nominating Committee for asking me to stand for Vice-President and President-Elect of the Linguistic Society of America. In lieu of a personal position statement, let me just say that I welcome the chance to serve on the Executive Committee; to learn more about the Society’s longstanding as well as its new endeavors and challenges; to get to know better the members and their many roles, interests, needs, and accomplishments; and in view of all of that, to apply as best I can my own sense of intellectual value, societal contribution, and of social justice in the course of my service."

 

Candidates for 2 At-large Seats on the Executive Committee

 

Andrea Berez-Kroeker (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)

Andrea Berez-Kroeker is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she teaches in the Language Documentation & Conservation track. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011, and was the recipient of the LSA Early Career Award in 2019. Her scholarly activities involve extending the basic principles of documentary linguistics, especially those concerned with ethical applications of cyberinfrastructure and digital standards, toward two distinct but related goals. The first of these is mobilizing the tools and methods of documentary linguistics in support of language-community goals for language reclamation, and the second is championing responsible reproducible research across the discipline.

As to the first, Andrea has worked on improving language community access to digital language materials in Hawai’i, Alaska, Guam, Canada and Papua New Guinea through capacity building in the creation and preservation of language documentation. She regularly teaches methods for language documentation at CoLang, and has taught similar classes at the 2019 Linguistic Institute and the Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute, among others.

As to the second, Andrea has been at the forefront of several initiatives to increase ethical reproducible research in linguistics. She is the lead author of Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field (published in Linguistics in 2018), which advocates for greater transparency of research methods and data in the discipline. As part of her work with the Research Data Alliance, she co-authored two related white papers, the Austin principles of data citation in linguistics and the Tromsø recommendations for citation of research data in linguistics, which provide guidance to linguists on both why and how to cite research data. Most recently, she assisted in drafting the LSA’s Statement on the scholarly merit and evaluation of Open Research in linguistics developed by CoSCIL, and is a co-editor of the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management (MIT Press, forthcoming).

In terms of leadership experience, Andrea has served as the junior and senior co-chair of the LSA Committee on Endangered Languages and Their Preservation (CELP, 2016-2017), is a founding co-chair of the Linguistics Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance (2017-present), was the president of the Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archiving Network (DELAMAN, 2014-2016), served as the Technology Section Editor of the journal Language Documentation & Conservation (2011-2016), and is a member of the board of directors of the eLinguistics Foundation.

Statement

I am truly honored to be nominated for the LSA Executive Committee. The values expressed in the current Long Range Strategic Plan are ones that I share, including especially the promotion of linguistic diversity, documentation, and revitalization; inclusiveness of demographics and subdisciplinary specialization; ethical conduct by all members; and the responsible assessment of research. The LSA is at a critical point in its history when the ability to reshape itself according to the needs and demands of a changing demographic of language professionals is proving critical to the Society’s survival.

The LSA is already showing some positive moves toward addressing concerns brought about by the societal traumas of the last year, in which a national economy in upheaval has revealed systemic inequalities in access to the traditional rewards of academia. I believe it is crucial that the LSA continue embracing a trajectory that allows for a wider range of views about language than what has traditionally been sanctioned by “capital-L” Linguistics. As a field we need to find additional ways of valuing language, languages, and the people who use them, above and beyond their role in supporting theory. The LSA also needs to continue examining and reforming the power structures that have long existed in academic linguistics, which promote the status quo to the detriment of including a wider range of voices and professional participants.

At the same time, I support new modalities inside of linguistic science that increase the transparency of our research methods and return to the primacy of linguistic data as the firm foundation upon which we build our theories and draw our conclusions. Proper management of linguistic data has not traditionally been rewarded in our field. I embrace the principles of ethically-minded Open Scholarship (that is, “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”), and I believe that the LSA needs to take a leading role in recognizing the care for linguistic data as a crucial part of our research-to-publication workflows.

Finally, I believe the LSA has a duty to serve a more active role in mentoring junior members, especially when it comes to advocating for one’s own research being adequately evaluated on its own merits, rather than against a one-size-fits-all standard that prioritizes some research foci over others. How many of our junior colleagues have declined to pursue a particular strand of research out of fear it would hurt their career? Equally, the Society needs to train its senior members in how to effectively express support for their junior colleagues at all career transition and advancement points.

Carmen Jany (California State University, San Bernardino)

Carmen Jany is a Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at California State University in San Bernardino. She earned her PhD in Linguistics from UC Santa Barbara (2007) and before that a Doctorate in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Zurich in Switzerland (2001). Upon graduating from UC Santa Barbara, she joined the Department of World Languages and Literatures at California State University, San Bernardino where she has been teaching courses in Spanish at all levels (for the Department of World Languages), Linguistic Anthropology and California Indian Languages (for the Anthropology Department), and Second Language Acquisition (for the English Department). She has also created and coordinates several new programs on the campus, including certificates in California Indian Languages with the support of the local tribes, and in Criminal Justice Spanish and Healthcare Spanish with the support of 3-year Department of Education multi-campus grants for each of these two programs.

Her research interests include Native American Languages (in particular the languages of California and Mesoamerica), Linguistic Typology, Grammar Writing and Language Documentation, Phonetics and Phonology, and Language Contact and Bilingualism. Over the past decade, she has been working on the documentation of Chuxnabán Mixe, a Mexican indigenous language spoken in Oaxaca, as well as on the archival research of Chimariko, a dormant Northern California language. She has published two books: a typologically-framed grammar of Chimariko (published in the University of California Publications in Linguistics series in 2009) and a study examining Spanish‑English language contact in Puerto Rican Spanish (published in the Europäische Hochschulschriften by Peter Lang in 2001). In addition, she has co‑edited three other books. Further publications include four book chapters and numerous journal articles on various topics, including grammatical relations, language contact phenomena, nominal compounding, phonetic/phonological descriptions, sonority and syllable weight, orthography design, and the role of social media in language documentation. Currently, she is working on negation in Chuxnabán Mixe and putting together a comprehensive guide on the Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America together with co-editors Marianne Mithun and Keren Rice to be published by De Gruyter. Moreover, she serves as an Associate Editor for the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL) and for the International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (IJLASSO).

She has been a member of the LSA since 2004 (and never missed an LSA Annual Meeting since) and is also a member of SSILA, ALT, SLE, LASSO, and ACTFL. Last year, she served as the Senior Co‑Chair for the Committee on Endangered Languages and Their Preservation (CELP). She has also served on the Program Committee for the sister society SSILA and on the Advisory Committee for the 2019 IYIL Conference in Fort Wayne.

Statement

It is a great honor to be nominated for this committee, and, if elected, I would welcome the opportunity to collaborate on the effective implementation of the LSA’s Strategic Plan, specifically the following two priorities:

1) Promote inclusiveness by providing students and community members (such as members of indigenous groups working on their languages) increased access to opportunities and resources that the LSA has to offer, as well as civility and politeness by suggesting standards for professional conduct that encourage courtesy and kindness at events and in publications; and

2) Ensuring that the LSA remains relevant to the widest possible range of linguistics and beyond by increasing collaboration with related professional societies, stimulating dialogue across sub‑disciplines and interdisciplinarily, as well as by expanding visibility in the media.

I believe that these priorities help the LSA grow and serve a wider range of scholars and community members while at the same time improving services for current members.

In my opinion, inclusiveness and civility should be the standards for any professional organization as we learn from each other by valuing everyone’s unique perspective and sharing it in a respectful way. As the Co‑Chair of the Committee of Endangered Languages and Their Preservation (CELP) I have had the opportunity to work with colleagues and community members to encourage participation of community scholars in LSA activities and to highlight contributions of community members and understudied languages to the discipline through the Excellence in Community Linguistics Award. To see the dedication and immense contributions of community members nominated for this award was truly inspiring. I would like to find ways to increase opportunities for community members and indigenous scholars to come to the Annual Meeting and to have their work recognized by the society. Over the years, I have learned so much from my language consultants, community members working on the preservation of their languages, and from colleagues working with various communities. The LSA could play an important role in valuing and featuring more diverse perspectives and ideologies.

To me, inclusiveness also means to expand opportunities for linguists from any background and at any level of their professional careers, including ethnic and racial minorities, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as junior scholars. As a professor at a teaching university, I have many responsibilities that involve guiding and mentoring students, student organizations, and colleagues at different levels in their studies and careers. I believe that mentorship is a key to success, and the LSA can play an important role in paving the road to successful careers in linguistics and related fields (as academic jobs are often scarce). Therefore, I would like to strengthen the LSA mentorship program and build additional resources for members of underrepresented groups, students, and junior scholars, such as targeted workshops, reducing the cost to attend the Annual Meetings, and encourage involvement in committee work and strategic planning.

My second goal, if elected, is to increase collaboration with other professional linguistics associations and networks across the globe and to enhance dialogue across sub-disciplines. As a member of multiple professional organizations based in the United States and in Europe, I appreciate the vision of different subdisciplines and the access to various networking opportunities, research outlets, and different types of resources. I believe that the LSA could widen its reach by strengthening its collaboration with current sister societies and building new partnerships with others. Over the past 14 years, I have created several interdisciplinary programs on my campus that have helped bring a new vision to my own discipline and to highlight the work of my department beyond our college. Through increased outreach the LSA could broaden its visibility while at the same time promoting the discipline and extending resources for its membership. Moreover, I think that the LSA could strengthen the promotion of existing committees and special interest groups among its membership and encourage greater participation by students and collaboration between committees. One way of doing that might be to have an informal gathering or expo at the Annual Meeting and/or a webinar where each committee shares their initiatives, goals, and accomplishments for interested members not yet involved with the committee. This would also allow for personal networking and finding shared interests among the different committees.

Of course, if elected, I would also welcome the opportunity to focus on other relevant issues as they arise and would feel honored to help the LSA grow and attend to its Strategic Plan.

Proposed Amendments to the LSA Constitution & Bylaws:

Package of amendments pertaining to student representation on the Executive Committee

LSA Constitution, Article IV. Committees

Current text:

1. There shall be an Executive Committee, composed of the above officers; the immediate Past President; six members of the Society, two of the six being elected each year to serve for three years each; a student member who serves for two years; and the Executive Director, who shall serve ex-officio without vote. The Executive Committee has ultimate responsibility and authority for all policy decisions.

Proposed changes (in bold):

1. There shall be an Executive Committee, composed of the above officers; the immediate Past President; six nonstudent members of the Society, two of the six being elected each year to serve for three years each; two student members, one being elected each year, who serve for two years; and the Executive Director, who shall serve ex-officio without vote. The Executive Committee has ultimate responsibility and authority for all policy decisions.

Rationale for the change

The changes allow for the addition of two student members of the LSA to the Executive Committee, serving staggered two-year terms.

**

Current text:

2. There shall be a Nominating Committee consisting of seven members. Two members shall be appointed by the President with the approval of the Executive Committee each year to serve for three years. Each year the President shall appoint one of the two senior members as Chair. The immediate Past President shall serve ex-officio with vote as the seventh member.

The Nominating Committee shall nominate one person for the position of Vice President and two for each vacant position on the Executive Committee. A report from the Nominating Committee and the slate of nominees with statements from the candidates shall be sent to the members at least seven months in advance of the Annual Meeting. If six months before the Annual Meeting, ten or more members have separately and in writing nominated any additional individual member for any position, and that member agrees to be presented as a candidate for the position in question, then that name shall be added to the ballot submitted to the members. This ballot shall be sent not less than four months in advance of the Annual Meeting. A quorum shall consist of those replies which have been received by the Secretary-Treasurer two months in advance of the date of the Annual Meeting.

Proposed changes:

2. There shall be a Nominating Committee consisting of seven members. Two members shall be appointed by the President with the approval of the Executive Committee each year to serve for three years. Each year the President shall appoint one of the two senior members as Chair. The immediate Past President shall serve ex-officio with vote as the seventh member.

The Nominating Committee shall nominate one person for the position of Vice President and two for each vacant nonstudent position on the Executive Committee. A report from the Nominating Committee and the slate of nominees with statements from the candidates shall be sent to the members at least seven months in advance of the Annual Meeting. If six months before the Annual Meeting, ten or more members have separately and in writing nominated any additional individual member for any position, and that member agrees to be presented as a candidate for the position in question, then that name shall be added to the ballot submitted to the members. This ballot shall be sent not less than four months in advance of the Annual Meeting. A quorum shall consist of those replies which have been received by the Secretary-Treasurer two months in advance of the date of the Annual Meeting.

The Committee on Student Issues and Concerns (COSIAC) shall nominate two graduate student members for each vacant student position on the Executive Committee.   Nominees shall be students at the time they are nominated, and should remain students for at least 18 months of their term.  A report from COSIAC and the slate of nominees with statements from the candidates shall be sent to the members at least seven months in advance of the Annual Meeting.  If six months before the Annual Meeting, ten or more members have separately and in writing nominated any additional individual student member for a vacant student position on the Executive Committee, then that name shall be added to the ballot submitted to the members.  This ballot shall be sent not less than four months in advance of the Annual Meeting.  A quorum shall consist of those replies which have been received by the Secretary-Treasurer two months in advance of the date of the Annual Meeting.

Rationale for the change:

The changes allow for the nomination of candidates for student positions on the Executive Committee by the Committee on Student Issues and Concerns. 

Bylaws pursuant to Article IV, COMMITTEES

Current Text

4. The Bloch Fellow, selected by the Committee on Linguistic Institutes and Fellowships, shall serve a two-year term as the student representative on the Executive Committee. The Bloch Fellow's term begins at the spring meeting of the Executive Committee and runs for two years from that date. The Bloch Fellow shall also serve as a member of the Committee on Student Issues and Concerns (COSIAC) for the duration of the term of service on the Executive Committee.

Proposed changes:

4. The Bloch Fellow, selected by the Committee on Linguistic Institutes and Fellowships, shall serve a two-year term as the student representative on the Executive Committee. The Bloch Fellow's term begins at the spring meeting of the Executive Committee and runs for two years from that date. The Bloch Fellow shall also serve as a member of the Committee on Student Issues and Concerns (COSIAC) for the duration of the term of service on the Executive Committee.

Rationale for the change: Eliminates the Bloch Fellow's role as the appointed student member of the Executive Committee.

Proposed implementation and transition:

Calendar year 2022 shall be a “transition year” during which only one student member will serve on the Executive Committee.   The nominating procedure will be as described above, except that:

• only one student position on the Executive Committee will be filled.
• COSIAC will be convened immediately on approval of the changes proposed above to the LSA Constitution, Article IV, Section 2.  
• COSIAC will prepare its report, along with statements from the two candidates, no less than 90 days following the approval of these changes.
• members will have one month from the time of COSIAC’s report to submit write-in candidates as described above.
• the student candidates will appear on the special ballot, as described in the LSA Constitution, Article IV, Section 2.

Beginning in 2023, the procedure and timetable detailed in the proposed changes above will be followed, such that a second position will be filled in 2023, and in subsequent years the student member who has served two years will be replaced.

Proposed Amendments to the LSA Bylaws

A single amendment pertaining to recognition as a Fellow of the LSA

Bylaws pursuant to Article II, MEMBERSHIP

Current text:

4. A member of the Society who has served as an Officer of the Society (i.e., President or Secretary-Treasurer), as Editor of Language or Semantics and Pragmatics, or as (co)Director of a Linguistic Institute, shall be recognized as a Fellow upon conclusion of service in that office. The initial set of Fellows shall include all current members of the Society who have held any of these offices.

Proposed change:

4. A member of the Society who has served as an Officer of the Society (i.e., President or Secretary-Treasurer), as Editor of Language or Semantics and Pragmatics, or as (co)Director of a Linguistic Institute, shall be recognized as a Fellow upon conclusion of service in that office. The initial set of Fellows shall include all current members of the Society who have held any of these offices.

Rationale for the change:

Arguments in Favor (including a list of LSA members supporting this change)

Arguments Against (including a list of LSA members opposing this change)

Please note that this proposed amendment is sponsored by a group of 25+ LSA members pursuant to the write-in provision below. In accordance with that provision, arguments in favor and opposed are linked above. For reference, the relevant text is provided here:

"An amendment to the Constitution may also be proposed by submitting a proposal IN WRITING TO THE LSA SECRETARIAT, AT THE EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY BUT NO LATER THAN JULY 1 OF ANY YEAR, along with favoring arguments and the signatures of at least twenty-five members of the Society. Amendments proposed in this way will be submitted to the full membership of the LSA for an electronic vote at the time of the regular election of officers in September of the same year. Whether an amendment is proposed by Executive Committee action or by petition it will be posted on the LSA website at the earliest possible opportunity, along with arguments in favor and opposed."