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Joan Bybee (Ph.D., UCLA) is Distinguished Emerita Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. At the University of New Mexico she has served as Associate Dean and Department Chair. In 2004 she served as President of the Linguistic Society of America. Professor Bybee is considered a leader in the study of the way language use impacts language structure. She has authored books and articles on phonology, morphology, language typology and language change. Her book The Evolution of Grammar (1994) uses a database of seventy-six languages to study the way in which languages spontaneously develop new grammatical structures.