ABSTRACT
I had expected to be a full-time, albeit independent, linguist when I left Reading. The editing, writing, lecturing, and broadcasting were all pointing me in the same direction: tell the world all about language, and its study, and its applications. I still thought of myself as mainly an applied linguist, but the language encyclopedia and Linguistics Abstracts were keeping my feet firmly on ‘pure’ ground. Still, pure or applied, it was going to be linguistics for me. And then a letter arrived.
