C.L. Baker Award

This award, given for the first time in 2020, honors the legacy of the late C. L. Baker (1939-1997) and is funded by a generous gift from his family. The winner receives a $500 honorarium and will be recognized at the Awards Ceremony at the LSA Annual Meeting. 

Frequency

Every second year - next award 2024 Annual Meeting. 

Nomination Deadline

September 30, 2023

Eligibility

The C.L. Baker Award recognizes excellence in research in the area of syntactic theory on the part of a scholar who is at the mid-point of a distinguished career. The typical nominee will be between 3 and 10 years post-tenure. However, stellar atypical candidates will also be seriously considered. Nominees should be members of the LSA at the time the prize is awarded.

The prize is intended to recognize a distinguished and still unfolding research record in syntax, one which meets the following criteria:

• it has had significant impact,
• it is forward-looking and innovative,
• it is empirically careful, and
• it engages the larger intellectual context for research on human language and goes beyond the merely technical in its analyses and proposals.

C.L. Baker Award holders

2022

Vera Gribanova (Stanford University)

Vera Gribanova has made lasting empirical and theoretical contributions in the central area of how the internal structure of words relates to principles of syntactic and semantic composition. Her research establishes important new connections among ellipsis, movement, and word formation, and draws conclusions which force us to rethink the division of labor across the components of grammar. Her work draws on a rich foundation of field and corpus-centered research on Russian and on Uzbek (a radically under-studied language), and deepens our understanding of both. Professor Gribanova has as a consequence emerged as a leading figure in Slavic and Turkic linguistics, while contributing to important theoretical advances in the field as a whole. 

2020 

Jon Sprouse (University of Connecticut)