2025 Award Winners
Arnold Zwicky Award
This award, given for the first time in 2021, is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in Linguistics and is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics in congratulating Robert J. Podesva on receiving this prestigious award! A Stanford Associate Professor, he researches phonetic variation and identity while actively mentoring LGBTQ+ students to promote inclusivity in academia.
Best Paper in Language Award
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This award, made the first time in 2012, is given for the best paper published in the journal Language in any given year. The Awards Committee and the Language Editorial team congratulate Elisabeth Norcliffe and Asifa Majid as their paper "Verbs of perception: A quantitative typological study" was selected for this award. |
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 Awards Committee would like to congratulate Jorge Rosés Labrada on being awarded this prestigious honor! Rosés is a distinguished documentary linguist specializing in the Indigenous languages of the Americas and has previously served as Chair of the LSA Committee on Endangered Languages and Their Preservation.
Elizabeth Pine Dayton Award
This travel award is intended to enable graduate students pursuing topics in sociolinguistics to attend the LSA Annual Meeting.
The Elizabeth Dayton Award Committee has selected Sara Castro Cantú as the recipient of this award. Sara's research examines the sociolinguistics of Spanish as a heritage language, and specifically, the factors that motivate the intergenerational transmission of Spanish.
Excellence in Community Linguistics Award
First established in 2013, this award recognizes the outstanding contributions that members of language communities (typically outside the academic sphere of professional linguistics) make for the benefit of their community's language.
The Committee on Endangered Languages and Their Preservation congratulates Benidiktus "Benny" Delpada on receiving this prestigious award! Benidiktus is a linguist and independent researcher specializing in Alor, Eastern Indonesia. With an MA in linguistics earned in 2016, he has worked for over 20 years with experts on Timor-Alor-Pantar languages and cultures, focusing on phonology and oral histories.
Leonard Bloomfield Book Award
First presented in 1992, this award recognizes a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to our understanding of language and linguistics. Nominations must address the volume's exemplary scholarship, enduring value, novelty, empirical import, conceptual significance and clarity.
The Bloomfield Book Award Committee congratulates Masatoshi Koizumi on his book Constituent Order in Language and Thought, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.
Linguistics in Practice Award
The Linguistics in Practice award will be given for the first time at the 2025 Annual Meeting, thanks to the advocacy and hard work of the Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group. It honors an individual linguist or a team (including at least one linguist) that has had an influence or impact on culture or society, especially on individuals without linguistics training. It honors a career outside academia for a lifetime of achievement or an important instance of invention or innovation.
Join the Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group in congratulating Janice (Ginny) Redish on receiving this prestigious award! For more than 40 years, Janice has used her linguistics education to help clients communicate clearly in print and online.
Linguistics Journalism Award
Established by the LSA in 2014, this award honors the journalist whose work best represents linguistics during the 12-month consideration period indicated in the call for nominations. The award is based on a single news story or body of work that reflects accuracy and timeliness as regards the material but is also appealing to non-specialist audiences.
The Public Relations Committee has selected Madeleine Schwartz for the article Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? published in the New York Times on May 14, 2024. Madeleine is the editor-in-chief of The Dial magazine and a journalist based in Paris. In 2023, she was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Journalism and teaches journalism at Sciences Po Paris.
Mentoring Award
Instituted in 2019, this award recognizes the work of individuals or organizations that have exhibited a sustained commitment to mentoring linguists.
The Awards Committee is pleased to announce Sonja Lanehart as the 2025 Mentoring Award Recipient. Sonja’s career is defined by mentoring scholars, particularly women and linguists of color, through formal, semi-formal, and informal channels.
Morris Halle Memorial Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology
First established in 2021, the Morris Halle Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology was designed to award outstanding scholarship in phonology by an early career faculty member in linguistics.
The Halle Award and Fromkin Prize Committee unanimously decided to recognize Ander Beristain as the new recipient of the Morris Halle Memorial Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology Award in 2025. Ander’s work addresses second and heritage language phonology and has found that bilingual speakers possess two physiological segment-timing systems.
Student Abstract Award
Instituted in 2010, these awards recognize the three best abstracts submitted by students for a paper or poster presentation at the LSA Annual Meeting.
First prize: Intensifier Variation and Change in Salinas, California by Jesus Adolfo Hermosillo, Jonatha WuWong, Yin Lin Tan and Irene Yi
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Second prize: A LIWC Approach Towards Healthy Aging Languages by Kunmei Han |
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Third prize: Gender Assignment Strategies in Spanish-English Mixed Noun Phrases by Anna Knall |
Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award
First presented in 2001 as the "Victoria A. Fromkin Prize for Distinguished Service," this award recognizes individuals who have performed extraordinary service to the discipline and the Society throughout their career.
The Awards Committee is pleased to announce that Hope Dawson has been selected as the recipient of the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award in 2025. Hope has been working behind the scenes for Language since 2002, starting as an editorial office assistant but soon taking on copyediting and proofreading papers and coordinating the overall publication process for the journal. She is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Ohio State University, working as GTA Coordinator in Linguistics.
CEDL Travel Grants
The Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics Committee (CEDL) is delighted to announce five winners of the CEDL Travel Grants to attend the upcoming 2025 LSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. These travel grants are supported by the Dennis R. and Carol Guagliardo Preston Fund for Diversity in Linguistics and administered by CEDL.
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Jaylene Canales is a first-year MA student at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign studying Hispanic Linguistics. Her current interests include Judeo-Spanish, Spanish Heritage Speakers, and Creole languages. |
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Alexis Davis is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Florida. Centering his research on topics related to African American Language, his expertise lies in improving sociolinguistic methodologies, and exploring the connections between artificial intelligence, language technology, Black speech, and Black communities. His most recent work is found in Research in Corpus Linguistics. |
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Michelle Drane is an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She is pursuing a double major in Community Organizational Development and Linguistics with a minor in Education Policy. She intends to study linguistic dialectal variation within the African diaspora, specifically African Americans, in hopes of bridging the gap in literary education in public schools. |
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Thomas Harb is a senior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and is an undergraduate officer of the Linguistics Student Organization. |
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Tvisha Rao is an aspiring computational linguist with an interest in semantics and pragmatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. |
COGEL Travel Grants
The COGEL Travel Awards are intended to increase the participation of gender-diverse student members in the 2025 LSA Annual Meeting. Awardees will get the opportunity to engage with linguistic research and to network with other researchers and peers. The Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics (COGEL) is delighted to announce two new recipients.
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Adrian Ray-Avalani is a PhD student at Northwestern working in computational sociolinguistics and human-centric NLP. |
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Jae Weller is a fourth year PhD student whose research focuses on phonetics & phonology. In addition, they are passionate about community building in the field. |
COZIL Travel Grants
The LSA Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] in Linguistics (COZIL) is offering two (2) travel grants in the amount of $500 each to support the participation of LGBTQ+ individuals in the 2025 LSA Annual Meeting.
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Amber Galvano is a Linguistics Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. Their research explores how understudied speech communities and often-relegated social factors can reshape our understanding of sociophonetics. |
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Joel Tillman is currently exploring his interests as an EdM student in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University. |
FGAE Travel Grant
The First Gen Access & Equity (FGAE) Committee is granting one $500 travel award to a first-generation student in linguistics to attend the 2025 LSA Annual Meeting. The FGAE Travel Grant is intended to increase the participation of first-gen students in the LSA and FGAE Committee; awardees will have the opportunity to explore linguistics topics or pursue their own areas of interest further by connecting with peers and scholars at the LSA Annual Meeting.
The FGAE Committee has selected Mario Crespo Ávila for this award. Mario is a third-year Linguistics student at UCM, specializes in language documentation and NLP, with interests in Micronesian languages.