The LSA is delighted to announce that prominent semanticist and LSA member Professor Gennaro Chierchia has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2019, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's 95th competition. He is the only linguist to receive this award out of 168 awardees and nearly 3,000 applicants. Gennaro Chierchia is Haas Foundation Professor of linguistics at Harvard University, and his work focuses primarily on semantics, syntax/semantics mapping, and philosophy of language.

As stated on the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's website, the Guggenheim Fellowship is a prestigious award "intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts". Gennaro Chierchia is among these individuals, and he plans to use the funding towards his research on the relationship between language and logic. Chierchia postulates that the sounds and signs of spoken and signed languages are assigned meaning spontaneously and that meaning comes from humans' aptness for logic. He calls this thesis the "Spontaneous Logicality of Language."

Congratulations to Professor Gennaro Chierchia!