2014 LSA Awards Announced
The Linguistic Society of America is delighted to announce the winners of the 2014 Early Career Award, the Kenneth L. Hale Award, the Linguistics Language, and the Public Award, the Student Abstract Awards, the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award, the Best Paper in Language Award, the Victoria A Fromkin Lifetime Service Award, and the new Excellence in Community Linguistics Award. The awards will be presented during the LSA Annual Meeting at a ceremony preceding the Presidential Address on Saturday, January 4, 2014.
Best Paper in Language (2013) Award: Toward a taxonomy of projective content, by Judith Tonhauser, David Beaver, Craige Roberts, and Mandy Simons. Language 89.1, 2013.
‘Toward a taxonomy of projective content’ unpacks current conceptions of presupposition and conventional implicature to refine our understanding of projective content generally. It establishes a series of diagnostics about projective contents that form part of a toolkit for cross-linguistic study. Based on a detailed and careful examination of English and of the understudied language Paraguayan Guaraní, the authors propose a novel dossier of subclasses of projective content. The sophistication of the work on Guaraní stands out, as does the toolkit that will enable similar research on other languages, allowing a much broader base of languages from which to understand the nature of projective content, and serving as a model for other cross-linguistic work in pragmatics.'
Early Career Award: Adrian Brasoveanu (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Adrian Brasoveanu is an extraordinarily productive semanticist who has already had considerable impact on the field, making an essential contribution to the field of dynamic semantics. He extends his work beyond strictly formal methodolgies to incorporate experimental data, corpus analysis, and Bayesian inference, taking the field in directions that are extraordinary in their interdisciplinarity, and connecting semantics with psycholinguistics, language processing, memory, and general cognition.
This award is presented in recognition of his contributions to semantics, for research that brings together linguistics, the philosophy of language and modern statistical and experimental tools in a way that will shape our work for a long time to come.
Leonard Bloomfield Book Award: Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words (MIT Press, 2012), by Jonathan David Bobaljik (University of Connecticut)
A work exemplary in its clarity, as well as in its empirical contribution. The sampling of language examined, and the attention to detail regarding each is impressive. This book is the definitive study of issues of comparative and superlative morphosyntax, and will become a model to follow in the study of other morphological phenomena.
Excellence in Community Linguistics Award: Mary Ann Metallic (Listuguj Education Directorate – Listuguj Mi'gmaq Government)
Mary Ann Metallic has done exemplary work to revitalize the Mi’gmaq language in her home community of Listuguj, Quebec. Her infectious passion for Mi’gmaq has led to the development of a successful teaching program, and her work with linguists has resulted in significant contributions to language documentation and linguistic theory.
Kenneth L. Hale Award: Claire Bowern (Yale University)
Claire Bowern and her work is the embodiment of the qualities that the Linguistic Society of America would like to see in a Hale award winner. Claire has been involved with documentation of the Bardi language in Australia since 1999, beginning while she was still an undergraduate at Australia National University. She led an oral history project, producing a large corpus of the language. She has published academic material and community materials both, including a gazetteer, narratives, a dictionary, and a learners guide. The nomination letter says that ‘Claire Bowern and her work represent the true spirit of Ken’s devotion to endangered languages in particular and linguistics at large. Her work is an inspiration to all of us, and especially to young scholars in our field.’
This award is presented in recognition of exemplary work on the documentation of Bardi, a highly endangered language, with outstanding contributions to the community and to linguistics.
Linguistics, Language and the Public Award: Donna Jo Napoli (Swarthmore College)
Donna Jo Napoli has worked with sign language linguists and doctors to co-write review articles on language acquisition and the importance of early exposure to language. Donna Jo was concerned that doctors give advice to parents and educational professionals about what language exposure young deaf children should have, yet Donna Jo felt that the doctors did not always have access to current research on acquisition, brain plasticity, and critical period. Donna Jo is an eloquent spokesperson on behalf of our field, showing how ideas about language can achieve societal benefit. She has elevated the discussion of early language experience of deaf children in a new and humane way, moving forward where others would have given up in frustration. This award recognizes Donna Jo for her many accomplishments, and notes in particular her work in educating the public about human language. This award is presented in recognition of her contributions to the medical profession and the public about the acquisition of sign language, and the importance of exposure to language at an early age.
Student Abstract Awards
Instituted in 2010, these awards provide $500 for the best abstract submitted by a student for a paper or poster presentation at the next Annual Meeting, and $300 for the submitters of the abstracts rated second and third. Every student who submits an abstract for the Annual Meeting is automatically considered for this award; no nominations are required. All abstracts submitted for the annual meeting are rated, blindly, by external reviewers and the LSA Program Committee.
1st Prize: Patrick Jones (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Cyclic evaluation of post-lexical prosodic domains: evidence from Kinande boundary tones
2nd Prize: Matthew Faytak (University of California, Berkeley): Chain shifts, strident vowels, and expanded vowel spaces
3rd Prize: Hope E. Morgan (University of California, San Diego): The Emergence of Syntax in Kenyan Sign Language: Constituent Order and Space
Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award: Stephen R. Anderson (Yale University)
The Linguistic Society of America is pleased to present the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award for 2014 to Stephen Anderson, for his outstanding service to the LSA since he became a member in 1965. He has served on numerous committees of the LSA, including the Program Committee, the Resolutions Committee, the Local Arrangements Committee, the Bloomfield Book Award Committee, and the Committee on Computing. He served as Parliamentarian, as a member-at-large of the Executive Committee, and as Vice President-Elect, President, and Past President, as well as Acting President.
In his tenure as Vice President/President/Past President/Acting President, Steve led the society through difficult times, and he took on extraordinary administrative responsibilities to ensure that the Society returned to a healthy administrative state. One of Steve’s goals was to bring the LSA publications into the digital age. He, together with Dieter Stein, proposed the establishment of eLanguage, an open access electronic ‘agora.’ As the Society moves to gather its publications under one roof, it is appropriate to recognize Steve’s leadership and contributions to the LSA’s publishing program and his administrative acumen at a key point in the Society’s history.
This award is presented in recognition of exemplary leadership as President (2007) and Acting President (2008), and sustained contributions to the Society’s electronic publishing program.