ABSTRACT
I’m so happy at this chance to sneak in a thank you to John Rickford. As I found myself (as one does) a mid-career linguist, my work in computational linguistics began to take into consideration more human context and social context. The transition was difficult, and was eased mightily by advice from John and inspiration from his work, which of course has always emphasized the importance of social consciousness in linguistics, and of the social and political implications of both language and linguistics. More recently as I began to work with Jennifer Eberhardt on language, race, and policing, we were very directly influenced by John’s work showing the role linguistics can play in social justice, like his long history of work on AAVE and education, and especially most recently his work with Sharese King on language discrimination against AAVE speakers in the courts.
