1.00 p.m. Monday 5 August, at ICPhS 2019 in Melbourne
The President, Patricia Keating, took the chair.
1 Minutes of Last Meeting
The minutes of the IPA General Meeting of 12 August 2015 in Glasgow as published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association vol. 45(3) were agreed on as being a correct record.
2 Matters Arising
Most matters arising from the previous minutes were addressed in reports given later in this meeting.
3 President’s Introduction
The President began by thanking the Congress Chair (Marija Tabain) and Organizing Committee (Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Paul Warren, Shunichi Ishihara, Donald Derrick, Felicity Cox, Rosey Billington, Gerry Docherty) for the enormous amount of work associated with hosting ICPhS in Melbourne and for the first time in the southern hemisphere. Providing support for the ICPhS is a major strand of activity for the IPA and will remain so into the future. The President highlighted some key developments for the IPA to be described later in this meeting by officers of the Association: Student awards are our largest spending activity, especially in an ICPhS year; post-incorporation, public filing of our financial reports – and taxes; JIPA’s move to online submissions and reviewing; the establishment of a range of Committees within Council to focus on a range of different tasks and initiatives. The Association’s website and membership database, new in 2015, are functioning very effectively, with membership renewals now taking place on a rolling basis. Thanks are due to Kayoko Yanagisawa for her continuing contribution to the IPA as volunteer webmaster. The Association’s social media accounts (managed, again on a voluntary basis, by social media coordinator Joanna Przedlacka) have gone from strength to strength now showing >3400 FaceBook followers, and >1800 Twitter followers. foNETiks, the electronic monthly newsletter affiliated with the IPA, currently has 1553 subscribers and remains an essential point of reference for our members – thanks to its current editorial team, Linda Shockey, Radek Swiecinski, Claire Timmins, Chiara Meluzzi, and Selina Sutton. The President outlined the progress made with CUP on publication issues, most notably perhaps, the move to classify IPA Illustrations as ‘free content’ after an interval of three years following their publication. It was also highlighted that scanned copies of Le Maître Phonétique from 1866–1970 are now available on JSTOR. Discussions are in hand regarding the possibility of an online special issue of JIPA containing new versions of Illustrations of some languages appearing only in the IPA Handbook, and thereby not so widely available.
4 Secretary’s Report
The IPA Secretary, Gerry Docherty, gave an overview of the Association’s activities in 2015–2019. Council’s views and agreement were sought on a range of issues, including (1) adoption of the new 2015 Unicode charts; (2) the establishment (in 2016) of new Council committees to develop particular streams of activity for the Association (the Conference Sponsorships and Student Awards Committee chaired by Katerina Nicolaidis, the Education Committee chaired by Maria-Josep Solé, the Committee on the Phonetic Documentation of Languages chaired by Ian Maddieson, the History of the IPA Committee chaired by Michael Ashby, the Social Media Committee chaired by Jane Stuart-Smith, and the Alphabet, Charts and Fonts Committee chaired by Patricia Keating); (3) a number of JIPA related issues, including its migration to the publisher’s “Scholar One” portal, broadening access to IPA Illustrations, and editorial Arrangements and enhanced support for the Editor. There was also consultation about the possibility of adopting “double-blind” reviewing for JIPA and about establishing some JIPA paper awards, but no consensus had yet emerged on these latter matters; (4) requests for Conference/Workshop Sponsoring with a small number of IPA Awards having been made available to members attending LabPhon 2018, PaPE 2017, Speech Prosody 2016, and ISAPh 2016; (5) the setting of the membership fee schedule in 2016 and 2018, and the move to rolling variable-date membership; (6) the scale and configuration of the support offered to the organizers of the ICPhS, in this current instance taking the form of a subvention to the Congress organizers, and an extensive package of Student/Gösta Bruce Awards, and for the first time a scheme that offered support to carers attending the Congress. A key task for the Secretary over the last 12 months was organising the Council/PC elections the results of which are laid out in a separate report within this JIPA issue. For the first time, all of the elections were carried out using electronic voting, enormously simplifying and expediting the process. Throughout the last 4 years, the Secretary has dealt with a steady stream of routine inquiries about the Association and about its charts, together with a wide range of permission requests in situations where the standard Creative Commons wording available on our website was insufficient from a publisher’s point of view. The Secretary would like to thank the out-going President, Patricia Keating, and the other IPA Officers for their outstanding job in ensuring that the IPA’s business maintained its necessary momentum, and to webmaster Kayoko Yanasigawa, and social media coordinator Joanna Przedlacka for their very effective and responsive support since 2015.
5 Treasurer’s Report and Webmaster’s Report
Treasurer Michael Ashby presented an overview of the IPA’s financial position outlining its principal sources of income and items of expenditure. Most of the Association’s income is from Cambridge University Press in relation to JIPA. Income from membership fees vary somewhat from year to year, with peaks often coinciding with ICPhS years. A separate Treasurer’s report is included in this issue, and the complete report has been posted on the Association’s website (https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/ officers_reports/2019/2019-treasurer-report-revised-2.pdf).
Webmaster Kayoko Yanagisawa reported that current IPA membership stands at 680, slightly lower than the figure at the start of the last ICPhS in 2015, but well up on the figure of 333 at the end of July 2018. Membership levels are driven to a significant extent by the ICPhS-related benefits accruing to members, and the challenge for the Association is to find ways to avoid the mid-ICPhS cycle dip. The IPA currently has members from 56 countries with around half of the membership from the USA, UK, Japan, and Germany.
6 Editor’s Report
Editor, Amalia Arvaniti, reported that the 2015–2019 period has been a very successful one for JIPA, with its three issues/year appearing in timely fashion and with a healthy pipeline of papers accepted and manuscripts under review. A major change has been the appointment of three Associate Editors (Jelena Krivokapić, Alexis Michaud, and Tine Mooshammer), alongside a refresh of and significant increase in the membership of the Editorial Board. The Editor outlined other significant developments in relation to JIPA over the last four years, including in 2015 inclusion in CUP’s FirstView service for articles that have been accepted and awaiting assignment to an issue, adoption in 2016 of the Scholar One platform providing electronic workflows for manuscript submission, peer review, and author correspondence, and in 2019 an increase in the JIPA page budget from 128pp to 160pp. JIPA has a 2015–19 acceptance rate of around 36%, and its JIF was 0.568 in 2018 (3rd quartile for linguistics journals), the latter mainly due to Illustrations – for which citations are often lower – and the fact that citations for JIPA papers can be generally slow to build. However, it is recognized that the Illustrations are very popular teaching and information resources and are an important driver of institutional subscriptions. It is also noted that the Immediacy Index (average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published) and Web of Science citations are both on an upward trajectory. A separate full Editor’s report is included in this issue, and the complete report has been posted on the Association’s website (https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/officers_reports/ 2019/2019_JIPA_editorial_report.pdf).
7 Examinations Secretary’s Report
The IPA Examinations Secretary, Patricia Ashby, spoke to a full report that can be accessed via the Association’s website (https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/ sites/default/files/officers_reports/2019/2019_examsecretary.pdf). It was noted that the number of Examination entrants has continued to decline since the last General Meeting in 2015, with only 20 entrants in the period 2015–2019. It was also noted that over that same period there has been a rather high failure rate on the part of those entrants (60%). The Examinations Secretary is proposing to undertake a series of measures over the next four-year cycle to attempt to generate a greater level of participation in the IPA’s Certificate qualification. If these fail to bear fruit over that period the Examination Secretary’s suggests that the IPA may have to consider whether the Certificate is sustainable in its current form. The Examination Secretary also requested the IPA Council to consider renaming the role as Chief Examiner and that said Examiner should be co-opted on to Council if they are not already a member.
8 Committee Reports
Brief oral reports were provided to the General Meeting from the Chairs of the various Sub-Committees of Council. The Chair of the Alphabet, Charts and Fonts Committee (Patricia Keating) noted the participation of its members Asher Laufer, Wai-Sum Lee, Adrian Simpson, John Wells, Ken Olson, Michael Everson, Martin J. Ball (the latter three non-Council members), Pongprapunt Rattanaporn, and Panagiotis Tsiaras (the latter two student members). The Chair also noted the invaluable technical support given to the Committee by Małgorzata Deroń. Key achievements since 2015 have been approval of the new IPA Kiel, Doulos SIL (serif), DejaVu (sans) fonts. Other highlights included the creation of an interactive IPA chart with audio recordings and symbol information, the on-going development of a set of IPA charts with meta-text reproduced in multiple languages (21 to date with more in progress), and a web-page drawing together downloadable images of all versions of the IPA charts published in the Associations journals from 1886–1970. Links to all of these resources will be made available soon on the IPA web-site. The Chair also noted that a request had been made jointly by Lorna Evans of SIL and Patricia Keating as IPA president to the Unicode Technical Committee for a change in shape of the glyph for the Laminal diacritic (“Combining Square Below”, U+033B) from square to the intended rectangle.
Katerina Nicolaidis, Chair of the Conference Sponsorships and Student Awards Committee spoke to the activities of that Committee, noting the participation of Committee members Patrice Beddor, John Esling, Jonathan Harrington, and Masaki Taniguchi. It was noted that IPA Student Awards had been made to student members attending a number of IPA-sponsored conferences from 2017, when the Committee was established. The bulk of the Committee’s support though had been offered to student member participants at the 2019 ICPhS with 49 IPA Awards/Gösta Bruce awards having been made after an extensive selection process arising from the 144 applications that were received. The Committee Chair noted that issues for further consideration include how to optimally disseminate the IPA policy for conference co-sponsoring, the use of unspent funds in any given year, and the eligibility criteria for IPA Student Awards.
The Chair of the Education Committee (Maria-Josep Solé) summarised the activities of that Committee thanking its members (Patricia Ashby, Plinio Barbosa, Keith Johnson) for their participation. A key development has been the establishment of the “Education” tab on the Association’s web-site, acting as a channel through which members and other users can access a wide range of educational resources, including a range of self-study and on-line courses and tutorials.
The Chair of the Phonetic Documentation of Languages Committee (Ian Maddieson) thanked the members of that Committee (Kofi Adu Manyah, Alexis Michaud, Ailbhe Ní Chasaide, Daniel Recasens, Marija Tabain) and noted that a primary focus has been to consider how the Committee can best promote the phonetic documentation of endangered languages. As a result, the IPA is in the process of providing supplementary funding to an applicant to the Endangered Language Fund, to support an instrumental phonetic component of fieldwork and language documentation. It is hoped that a similar approach can be taken in 2020 in partnership with the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS in London.
9 Election Results
A full account of the 2019 Elections for the IPA Council, and for the Permanent Council for the Organization of the International Congresses of Phonetic Sciences can be found in the separate report published in this issue. The Secretary summarised the outcomes, and thanked outgoing members of the 2015–2019 Council, William J. Barry, Cécile Fougeron, Martine Grice, Jonathan Harrington, Ian Maddieson, Kofi Adu Manyah, Jacqueline Vaissière, and John Wells (past president). Thanks were also given to outgoing members of the Permanent Council (Mary Beckman, Cécile Fougeron, Linda Shockey, Michael Ashby, and Daniel Recasens).
10 Address by Incoming President
The new President, Michael Ashby, thanked members for returning him to the Council, and his fellow Council members for electing him to the role of President. He was honoured, pleased, and proud to take up the role. He noted that his name was the fifteenth in a list that extended back to 1886, and that he had known or worked with no fewer than nine of his predecessors. He paid particular tribute to the two most recent Presidents, Patricia Keating and John Esling, for the energy and dedication they had shown in his own time on the Executive, and expressed the hope that he would be able to live up to the example they had set. More widely, he acknowledged the hard work and dedication of all of those who work to sustain the IPA, whether on the Executive or in other roles.
Shortness of time in the meeting prompted him to curtail his general remarks. He observed also that the audience he most wanted to address – those who had only recently joined the IPA, mainly with a view to attending ICPhS – were evidently not present in any numbers. He would instead reach them in due course with an email sent to all members.
His main priorities for the coming four years would be to retain members, to widen the international basis of membership, and to encourage wider participation by all members in the affairs of the IPA.
11 Other Business
No other matters were raised by non-Council members for discussion.
12 Closing
The President thanked the assembly and closed the meeting. The next IPA General Meeting will be held during the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in 2023. It will be chaired by the new President, Michael Ashby. The meeting closed at 2:15 p.m.
