NWSA News

FROM THE NATIONAL OFFICE The National Women\u27s Studies Association has been in business at the University of Maryland for two months as I write this memo. When it appears, the semester will be almost over, the weather may be better, and I will be preparing to report on my activities as Coordinator at the Spring 1978 meeting of the NWSA Coordinating Council. The outlines of that report are already taking shape

NWSA News

REPORTS FROM THE STEERING COMMITTEE May 30 to September 1, 1977 At the May 26-29 meeting of the NWSA Coordinating Council in Milwaukee, it was decided that a Steering Committee of six members would be responsible for the day-to-day decisions/operations of the NWSA. The intention was that the Steering Committee would work with the National Coordinator of the NWSA, who would fill one of the six slots. Four Coordinating Council delegates were elected to serve on the Steering Committee until the next Coordinating Council meeting: Elizabeth Baer (Student Caucus), Sherna Gluck (Pacific Southwest/Community delegate), Barbara Hillyer Davis (Treasurer, Women\u27s Studies Program delegate), Toni McNaron (Lesbian Caucus). The two remaining slots are to be filled by the National Office Coordinator and the 1978 National Conference Coordinator

NWSA News

TASKFORCE REPORTS Elizabeth Baer Initial Efforts of theCurriculum Taskforce The Curriculum Taskforce is fortunate in having several strongly involved participants: the PreK-12, Lesbian, and Student Caucuses, and the New York and Northwest regions. To date, several of the participants have singled out areas of prime concern to them and are inviting those interested to send materials, ideas, and support

NWSA News

NEW COORDINATOR FOR NWSA: EIAINE REUBEN On the first of January, Dr. Elaine Reuben began serving as Coordinator of the National Women\u27s Studies Association, headquartered at the University of Maryland/College Park. As National Coordinator, Reuben is responsible for implementing policies set by the members of NWSA. Once fully established, Reuben\u27s office will collect and distribute information about women\u27s studies programs and curricula, initiate planning for the second NWSA Convention, and facilitate the work of all regions, taskforces, and caucuses within NWSA. Reuben\u27s first priority is to assist the taskforces charged with fund-raising and the membership drive

NWSA News

Elaine Reuben FROM THE NATIONAL OFFICE The 1978-79 academic year promises to be an important and productive time for NWSA. I am very pleased to be able to report that the Association has received a small grant from The Ford Foundation, $25,000 for a period of fifteen months, to support and strengthen this office and its capacity to reach and serve persons and groups working in women\u27s studies. This grant will make it possible to prepare and distribute membership and other Association materials throughout the country, will allow the Association\u27s Steering Committee to meet and to communicate more effectively with in the organization, and will provide some resources by for the initial planning stages of several major Association projects. One of which is our First National Convention

The language faculty that wasn't : a usage-based account of natural language recursion

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking—perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerges gradually by piggybacking on domain-general sequence learning abilities. Evidence from genetics, comparative work on non-human primates, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that humans have evolved complex sequence learning skills, which were subsequently pressed into service to accommodate language. Constraints on sequence learning therefore have played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of linguistic structure, including our limited abilities for processing recursive structure. Finally, we re-evaluate some of the key considerations that have often been taken to require the postulation of a language faculty