Leonard Bloomfield Book Award

Purpose

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, and include a brief citation that can be read at the presentation of the award. Given annually.

 

Eligibility

All authors of nominated books should be current members of the LSA. Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the selection committee for books whose authors are not all LSA members, such as books with co-authors who are native speaker language consultants who collaborated in the preparation of the book, but who are not otherwise part of the Linguistics community. In all cases, at least one author must be a member of the LSA. Book must be published in the calendar year previous to the one in which they are nominated.

Criteria: 
  • Exemplary scholarship and enduring value
  • Novelty (says something that is not part of the published literature)
  • Empirical Import (claims made are empirically falsifiable)
  • Conceptual Significance (enriches overall understanding of the nature of human language)
  • Clarity (points are clearly formulated; text is reader-friendly)
Nominations must be accompanied by five copies of the book. Publishers as well as LSA members may nominate a book for the Bloomfield Award. 

Deadline for receiving nominations and books: May 1

Selection 

This award is chosen by the LSA Bloomfield Book Award Committee, which evaluates all books submitted and recommends one title to the Executive Committee, which must formally approve the recommendation.

Awardees

2024

Professor Silvina Montrul for "Native speakers, interrupted" (Cambridge University Press). 

2023

Nadine Grimm for "A Grammar of Gyeli." (Lg Science Press).

2022

Mary Kohn, Walt Wolfram, Charlie Farrington, Jennifer Renn, and Janneke Van Hofwegen for African American Language (Cambridge University Press).

2021

John H. Esling, Scott R. Moisik, Allison Benner and Lise Crevier-Buchman for Voice Quality: The Laryngeal Articulator Model (Cambridge University Press).

2020

Vsevolod Kapatsinski for Changing Minds Changing Tools: From Learning Theory to Language Acquistion to Language Change (MIT Press).

2019

Bridget Drinka for The Periphrastic Perfect through History (Cambridge University Press).

2018

Charles Yang for The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language (MIT Press).

2017:

Brad Montgomery-Anderson for Cherokee Reference Grammar (The University of Oklahoma Press).

2016

William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart for Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction (Oxford University Press).

2015

Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber, and Ingo Plag for The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (Oxford University Press).

2014

Jonathan Bobaljik for Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives and the Structure of Words (MIT Press).

2013

Victor Golla for California Indian Languages (University of California Press).

2012

Jack Martin for A Grammar of Creek (Muskogee).

2011

Hans Boas for The Life and Death of Texas German (Duke University Press).

2010

Pamela Munro and Catherine Willmond for Let's Speak Chickasaw, Chikashshanompa' Kilanompoli' .

2009

Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews for The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (Cambridge).

2008

William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg for The Atlas of North American English (Mouton de Gruyter).

2006

R. M. W. Dixon for The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (Oxford University Press).

2004

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al. for The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press).

2002

Marianne Mithun for The Languages of Native North America (Cambridge University Press).

2000

Lyle Campbell for American Indian Languages:The Historical Linguistics of Native America (Oxford University Press).

1998

Alice C. Harris and Lyle Campbell for Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Cambridge University Press).

1996

William Labov for Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors (Blackwell Publishers).

1994

Johanna Nichols for Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (University of Chicago Press).

1992

Keren Rice for A Grammar of Slave (Mouton de Gruyter).