The LSA is delighted to announce the following awards made this month. All awardees will be presented with their awards during the 2023 Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.

The LSA Journalism Award

A subcommittee of the LSA Public Relations Committee was tasked with reviewing the nominations for the 2023 LSA Journalism Award. All nominees highlighted the beauty of language and language change, showcased the ways in which those nominated have engaged in careful writing that attends to the nuances of language and linguistics, and how each has been influenced by and consulted linguists in these areas. 

But one stood out.  The award recipient for 2023 is “DeafBlind Communities May Be Creating a New Language of Touch” by Andrew Leland, published in The New Yorker.   The committee saw this as “an extremely well-crafted longform article that doesn't skimp on the linguistic nuance” that “went into depth” and “avoids ableist tropes by writing from the perspective of the DeafBlind community.” The coverage of “ASL, language emergence, creoles” and the “clear articulation of issues with accessibility [and] in-group challenges” was compelling. The article even mentions an emergency NSF grant being awarded to a set of linguists during the pandemic for teaching Protactile to DeafBlind children isolated in their homes. Emergency federal grant funding to support instruction of a new language! As one member said, “This article blew my freaking mind. A new modality! A new speech community! Talking through touching! … How could this be any better?” 

The LSA Mentoring Award

The LSA Awards Committee is pleased to announce Dr. Robert Bayley as the 2023 LSA Mentoring Award Recipient.  Dr. Bayley has been teaching in colleges and universities nationally and globally for more than 50 years, serving as a mentor for more than 62 doctoral, master's, and undergraduate students. From the time that prospective students contact him to inquire about the program to many years down the line, when those same students are faculty members at institutions around the globe, Professor Bayley unwaveringly supports his mentees at every stage of their careers. As a Professor Emeritus, he is still continuing his guidance, providing students with valuable suggestions about research and career. His contribution to the field should be well acknowledged.

The Early Career Award

Instituted in 2010, the LSA Early Career Award recognizes scholars early in their career who have made outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics. The award provides travel reimbursement (up to $500) and complimentary registration for the 2023 Annual Meeting. Nominators must be current LSA members.    

The members of the LSA Awards Committee were particularly impressed by Nicole Holliday’s rich publication record (23 publications to date, most within the last 5 years, plus 4 more accepted and 6 more under review, in a wide variety of journals. She has given 22 invited talks since receiving the Ph.D. There is impressive public awareness of her work: she is quoted in innumerable articles in major newspapers (New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR) and other media outlets. She has contributed much to the LSA, serving as Chair of the Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics 2017-2018.

Student Abstract Award

Instituted in 2010, the Student Abstract Award provides $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.

2023 Award Recipients are:

• 1st Place:  Metrical structure in Northern Pomo, Brady Dailey, Boston University
• 2nd Place:  Variability in Paraguayan Guarani nasal harmony, Katherine Russell, University of California, Berkeley
• 3rd Place:  A semiotic analysis of right-wing surveillance of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's communicative repertoire, Gabriella Licata, University of California, Berkeley

Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award

From the LSA Awards Committee:  For her collective work to spread the word about the beautiful, complex, and fun stories that linguistics has to offer the general public, the Linguistic Society of America commends Dr. Valerie Fridland for her exquisitely crafted essays for non-academic audiences and awards her the 2023 Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award.

Best Paper in Language 2023

The LSA Awards Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the Best Paper in Language for 2023:  Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order' language, Rachel Nordlinger, Gabriela Garrido Rodriguez, and Evan Kidd.

Ken Hale Award

The LSA Awards Committee is pleased to announce Andrew Garrett as the 2023 Ken Hale Award Recipient. Through his linguistic and community work documenting languages of Northern California, principally Yurok and Karuk, Andrew Garrett admirably encapsulates the different commitments and achievements of the great Ken Hale. A leading scholar originally trained in historical linguistics and Indo-European, whose honors include the 2015 Best Paper in Language Award (with three co-authors), Garrett has produced work on a wide range of linguistic, historical, and cultural issues as well as producing new studies and web-based lexical and grammatical tools useful to language specialists and linguists in general and to the Yurok and Karuk communities. Most recently he is the author of The unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, memory, and Indigenous California (MIT Press, to appear in 2023).

Victoria Fromkin Memorial Prize for Student Excellence in Phonology

The LSA Committee of Phonologists reported that they took into consideration the originality, breadth, and productivity of research in phonology by each nominated candidate. Their decision to award Sammy Anderson this year was unanimous.

Sammy Andersson was selected for the Victoria Fromkin Award on the basis of their important contributions to theoretical phonology and morphology at an early career stage. Andersson's publication record is impressive, with papers published in Glossa and accepted to Phonological Data and Analysis (PD&A) before finishing graduate school. Their work shows breadth, with evidence of excellence in corpus and computational linguistics, phonetics, phonology, morphology, and fieldwork. Their PD&A paper and dissertation show careful empirical work on Abkhaz with significant import for metrical theories, requiring a rethinking of the types of units that can host stress and making a novel series of predictions about stress typology.

Morris Halle Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology

The LSA Committee of Phonologists reported that they took into consideration the originality, breadth, and productivity of research in phonology of each candidate. Their decision to award Jane Chandlee this year was unanimous.

Jane Chandlee was selected for the Morris Halle Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology based on her impressive record of journal publications and professional presentations and the originality and breadth of her research. Her work brings new types of evidence from computational phonology to bear on classic questions in phonology regarding representations, transformations, and locality. The findings of her work have important implications for computational linguistics, phonology, and morphology.

Elizabeth Dayton Award

The Elizabeth Dayton Award is a travel award intended to enable graduate students pursuing topics in sociolinguistics to attend the LSA Annual Meeting. This year, the Dayton award committee considered 5 nominees.  In addition to the specialization requirement, the terms of the award require that the student: 1) be an active student member of the LSA, 2) be a graduate student, and 3) demonstrate a distinguished level of scholastic achievement. The committee recommends Xinye Zhang for the 2022 award. A runner-up candidate was also selected.

Zhang’s research interests lie in bilingualism and childrens’ acquisition of variation.  More specifically, she uses ethnographic and statistical methods to investigate the learning of interlanguage features, lexical tone, and word-initial sibilants by 3 types of speakers: young heritage speakers of Mandarin, L2 students and bilingual children. Her dissertation explores language learning by emergent bilingual children in two dual immersion preschools in California.  She has a 4.0 GPA, has presented at several conferences, and is a coauthor on several publications, including a coauthored chapter in the 2022 Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and sociolinguistics. The committee found her dual focus on linguistic detail and its broader implications to be compelling. Zhang submitted an abstract for a paper to be presented at the LSA this year on variation in teacher speech.