Morris Halle Memorial Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology

Purpose

First established in 2021, the Morris Halle Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology will be used to defray expenses associated with participation in the LSA’s Annual Meeting. It will be awarded for outstanding scholarship in phonology by an early career faculty member in linguistics. This award is endowed with much gratitude by LSA Life Member Robert Vago (Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY), who earned his undergraduate degree at UCLA (1970) and his PhD at Harvard (1974). Awarded annually.

Eligibility

Nominators and nominees must attest that they meet the basic criteria for the award that:
  1. They both are LSA members and
  2. The nominee is an early career phonologist
The nomination must include a CV, two papers of representative work, responses to questions related to the nominees significant impact of outstanding scholarship in phonology, forward looking and innovative character of the nominee's work in phonology, and empirical rigor of the nominee's scholarship in phonology. The nomination must include a citation statement to be read at the Award Ceremony if the nomination is selected. 
 

Selection

The Halle Award and Fromkin Prize Committee reviews nominations and makes recommendations to the Executive Committee, which must formally approve the recommendations.
 

Previous Awardees

2024

Professor Hannah Sande was awarded on the basis of her impressive publication record as well as her impact on students and the Africanist community. A theoretical innovator in phonology and its interfaces with morphology and syntax who carefully grounds her work in detailed, variegated documentation of Guébie and other languages and who uplifts her students and West African collaborators and interlocutors, Hannah Sande is a model for phonologists in the twenty-first century. Her extensive and well-documented Guébie fieldwork has provided an important source for other researchers working with Kru languages and Ivorian cultures as well as for the Guébie community.

 

2023

Jane Chandlee is awarded 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.

2022

Juliet Stanton. With this award, the LSA recognizes in Stanton’s research the linguistic spirit of Morris Halle: her work is fundamental and far-reaching, rigorous and comprehensive, deep and broad. She leads the field in redefining what it means to do Phonology. By combining analysis with experiments and computational modeling in the service of theory, she has reinvigorated the field of phonological typology. By exhausting the available data, she sets a new bar for empirical depth. All those that worked with Morris will be hearing in their heads his voice proclaiming, “You gotta read this paper by Juliet!” Congratulations on this well-deserved honor.