2026 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 Kira Hall on receiving this prestigious award!
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 Danny Law, Justin M. Power, and David Quinto-Pozos as their paper "Bringing signed languages into the study of regular sound change" was selected for this award. |
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.
Join the CL Baker Award Committee in congratulating Ivona Kucerova on receiving this prestigious award!
Centennial Student Scholarship Award
Established in 2024, the Centennial Student Fund supports student attendance and participation at the LSA Annual Meeting. The funds can be used to provide travel grants for students, including both undergraduate students with a demonstrated strong interest in linguistics and graduate students in linguistics or a related field who have not yet defended their dissertations..png)
Erubey López is a recent graduate of Pomona College researching Spanish-Maya bilingualism and phonetic variation in the Yucatán Spanish dialect.
Qiushi Chen is a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut, studying syntax and morphology across languages.
Early Career Award
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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 Sharese King on being awarded this prestigious honor! Dr. Sharese King, the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, studies racialized language in the courtroom and beyond.
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 Emma Breslow as the recipient of this award. Emma Breslow, a PhD candidate at UHM, examines sociophonetic variation and language attitudes in secular Yiddish, a diasporic minoritized language.
Indigenous Scholarship Fund Award
Established in 2024, the Indigenous Scholarship Fund provides financial support for individuals who have a deep and personal connection to, or abiding interest in, an Indigenous community of the Americas or the American Pacific to engage in scholarship focused on the languages of those communities, including but not limited to their documentation, preservation, and revitalization.
Adrienne Tsikewa PhD, currently serves as the Project Manager for the West Region Native American Language Center at the University of Arizona.
Braden Thue works on language revitalization at the Dakota Language Institute of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in northeast South Dakota.
Kenneth Hale Award
First presented in 2002, this award recognizes scholars who have done outstanding work on the documentation of a particular language or family of languages that is endangered or no longer spoken.
Jeffrey Heath has done synchronic/diachronic work on Choctaw, Australian, Arabic, Tamashek, Songhay, Dogon, Mande, Bangime, Siamou and other West African languages.
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 Norbert Hornstein on his book The Merge hypothesis: A theory of aspects of syntax, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.
Linguistics in Practice Award
The Linguistics in Practice award was 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 Mark Mandel on receiving this prestigious award!
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 Cathleen O'Grady for the article "Imperfect Sounds: Cochlear implants give deaf kids unprecedented access to sound. But insisting they avoid using sign language my be risky" Science, June 24, 2025. Cathleen O'Grady is a science journalist whose work has been published in Science, The Atlantic, and National Geographic, among others.
Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award
First presented in 1997, this award honors an individual or group for work that effectively increases public awareness and understanding of linguistics and language. Works in any medium are eligible, including books, documentary films, software, and lectures.
This year's award goes to Charlotte Vaughn for her leadership on The Language Science Station, a multi-institution partnership with the Planet Word Museum in Washington D.C. that places linguistics students and linguistics research directly on the museum floor.Dr. Charlotte Vaughn is Assistant Research Professor at University of Maryland. Her research investigates the cognitive processing of sociolinguistic variation.
Mentoring Award
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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 Daniel Altshuler as the 2026 Mentoring Award Recipient. Daniel Altshuler is Professor of Semantics and Pragmatics at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow of Jesus College.
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: Xinyu Leslie Liao
Xinyu is a PhD student at University of Toronto studying phonetics and computational psycholinguistics, focusing on adaptability and cognitive encoding of speech.
Abstract: "Directional bias, lexical competition, and frequency effects in sound change: experimental evidence from perceptual learning."
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Second prize: Jack Pruett |
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Third prize: PraiseGod Aminu |
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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 John Rickford has been selected as the recipient of the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award in 2026. John R Rickford is Stanford University professor of Linguistics, emeritus. LSA President in 1985, he’s a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of the British Academy.
Victoria Fromkin Memorial Prize for Student Excellence in Phonology Award
First established in 2021, the Victoria Fromkin Memorial Prize for Student Excellence in Phonology will be used to defray expenses (up to $500) associated with participation in the LSA’s Annual Meeting.
Join the Halle Award and Fromkin Prize Committee in congratulating Jian-Leat Siah on receiving this prestigious award!
CEDL Travel Grants
The Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics Committee (CEDL) is delighted to announce four winners of the CEDL Travel Grants to attend the upcoming 2026 LSA Annual Meeting in New Orleans. 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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Shabnam Alizadeh Incheh is a Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut studying bilingualism’s cognitive mechanisms, including interference, sentence, and speech processing. |
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Oluwasegun Amoniyan is a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, and his interests include socio-phonetics and co-speech. |
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Dema Smadi is a sixth-year PhD candidate in Linguistics at UT Arlington researching phonetic attrition, bilingualism, and second language Acquisition. |
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Linda Portillo-Melendez is a MA/MS student at California State University, Dominguez Hills interested in field research for Indigenous languages and working on documenting polar questions in Mixtec. |
COGEL Travel Grants
The COGEL Travel Awards are intended to increase the participation of gender-diverse student members in the 2026 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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Cassie Davenport is a 5th year student at Northwestern University, working on psycholinguistic investigations of syntactic and pragmatic phenomena. They are awarded this year's COGEL travel grant in recognition of their contributions to uncovering how gender biased nouns and adjectives affect language comprehension. |
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Jennifer Kaplan is a 6th year student at UC Berkeley, working on language usage and linguistic attitudes among trans and non-binary francophones. She is awarded this year’s COGEL travel grant in recognition of her contributions to research on inclusive language and anti-gender discourses. |
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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 2026 LSA Annual Meeting.
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Emily Sandall, a PhD student at Georgetown University, whose research applies corpus-assisted discourse analysis (CADS) framework (Baker et al. 2008) to the question of how online communities of transmasculine and transfeminine individuals co-construct group identities through nomination strategies (Wodak 2015), particularly pronoun selection. |
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Dee Hunter, a PhD student at the University of Arizona, whose research deals with the semantics surrounding the concepts of temporally bound gender, particularly utilizing the word "former." |
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 2026 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 Leticia Hanada for this award. Leticia Hanada, a PhD student at the University of Texas, Austin, whose research focuses on the structure of sign language, with an emphasis on Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) and American Sign Language (ASL).