Student Abstract Award

Purpose

Instituted in 2010, this award provides $500 for the best abstract submitted by a student for a paper or poster presentation at the Annual Meeting and $300 for the submitters of the abstracts rated second and third. The awardees will be publicly announced as soon as they have been selected and will be recognized in the Handbook for the Annual Meeting.

Eligibility

Every student who submits an abstract for the Annual Meeting is automatically considered for this award; no nominations are required. 

Selection

All abstracts submitted for the annual meeting are rated blindly by external reviewers and the LSA Program Committee. Once abstracts have been accepted, the LSA Staff (who have access to information about abstract submitters) will determine which student abstracts were most highly rated. In case of a tie, the Awards Committee members will read the abstracts and select the winner and the two runners-up. The winners are then submitted to the Executive Committee for final approval. 

Previous Awardees

2024

  • First Prize: Jackson Kellogg (Boston University) for "A focus-controlled acoustic analysis of phrase- and word-level prosody in Amharic"
  • Second Prize: Daoxin Li (University of Pennsylvania) for "Modelling the distributional learning of verb argument structure"
  • Third Prize: Anabelle Caso (Concordia University) and Oisín Ó Muirthile (Harvard University) for "Secondary predication in Irish and the syntax-prosody interface"

2023

  • First Prize: Brady Dailey (Boston University) for "Metrical structure in Northern Pomo"
  • Second Prize: Katherine Russell (University of California, Berkeley) for "Variability in Paraguayan Guarani nasal harmony"
  • Third Prize: Gabriella Licata (University of California, Berkeley) for "A semiotic analysis of right-wing surveillance of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's communicative repertoire"

2022

  • First Prize: Aron Finholt (University of Kansas) for "States and Possession in Mashi: A Novel Argument for Decomposing have"
  • Second Prize: Josh Phillips (Yale University) for "Cyclicity, narrativity and Djambarrpuyŋu tense"
  • Third Prize: Caitlin Coons (University of Texas at Austin) for "Relative Clause Typology Across Signed and Spoken Languages"

2021

  • First Prize: Hironori Katsuda (University of California, Los Angeles) and Jeremy Steffman (University of California, Los Angeles) for "The role of segment and pitch accent in Japanese spoken word recognition"
  • Second Prize: Shannon Bryant (Harvard University) for "Evidence from Oromo on the typology of complementation strategies"
  • Third Prize: Maura O'Leary (University of California, Los Angeles) and Richard Stockwell (University of California, Los Angeles) "Skills-based grading: a novel approach to teaching formal semantics"

2020

  • First Prize: Kate Mooney (New York University) for "Unifying Prosodic and Segmental Repair: Metathesis and Epenthesis in Uab Meto"
  • Second Prize: Milena Šereikaitė (University of Pennsylvania) for "Case of Complex Event Nominalizations in Lithuanian"
  • Third Prize: Anna Bax (University of California, Santa Barbara) for "Linguist-speech pathologists collaboration as service-in-return to speakers of minority languages"

2019

  • First Prize: Robert Xu (Stanford University) for Placing Social Types Through Prosodic Variation: An Investigation of Spatial Meanings in Mainland China"
  • Second Prize: Colin P. Davis (MIT) for English Possessor Extraction"
  • Third Prize: Emily Clem (UC Berkeley) for The cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes"

2018

  • First Prize: Daniel Duncan (New York University) for "Changing language and identity during suburbanization"
  • Second Prize: Milena Šereikaitè (University of Pennsylvania) for "Active existential voice in Lithuanian: Burzio's generalization revised"
  • Third Prize: Carol-Rose Little and Mia Wiegand (Cornell) for "A compositional morphosemantic analysis of exclusivity in Ch'ol"

2017     

  • First Prize: Emily Moline (University of California, Davis) for "Emergent Adult L1 Literacy: Theorizing Findings from a Case Study"
  • Second Prize: Jon Ander Mendia (University of Massachusetts Amherst) for "Knowledge about Ignorance: what Superlative Modification teaches us"
  • Third Prize: Chantal Gratton (Stanford University) for "Non-binary identity construction and intraspeaker variation"

2016    

  • First Prize: Nicholas Baier (University of California, Berkeley) for "Deriving partial anti-agreement"
  • Second Prize: Andrew Lamont (Indiana University) for "Implications of a typology of progressive place assimilation"
  • Third Prize: Gwynne Mapes (University of Bern) for "'Oh, and it's got to be cut into four triangles, never in half': The role of negation in Bon Appetit's 'Editor's Letter'"

2015    

  • First Prize: Jason Zentz (Yale University) for "The composite derivation of Shona partial wh-movement"
  • Second Prize: Danielle Barth (University of Oregon) for "Reduction in Child Speech, Child-Directed Speech and Inter-Adult Speech"
  • Third Prize: Bryan Rosen (University of Wisconsin-Madison) for "Diagnosing Direct Modification in Hocąk"

2014   

  • First Prize: Patrick Jones (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for "Cyclic evaluation of post-lexical prosodic domains: evidence from Kinande boundary tones"
  • Second Prize: Matthew Faytak (University of California, Berkeley) for "Chain shifts, strident vowels, and expanded vowel spaces"
  • Third Prize: Hope E. Morgan (University of California, San Diego) for "The emergence of syntax in Kenyan Sign Language: Constituent order and space"

2013 

  • First Prize: John Sylak (University of California, Berkeley) for "The Phonetic Properties of Voiced Stops Descended from Nasals in Ditidaht"
  • Second Prize: Marc Garellek (University of California, Los Angeles) for "Prominence vs. phrase-initial strengthening of voice quality"
  • Third Prize: Josef Fruehwald (University of Pennsylvania) for "Differentiating Phonetically and Phonologically Conditioned Sound Change"

2012

  • First Prize: Jennifer Wilson (University at Buffalo) "Evidence for Infixation after the First Syllable: Data from a Papuan Language"
  • Second Prize: M. Ryan Bochnak (University of Chicago) "Cross-linguistic variation in degree semantics: The case of Washo"

2011

  • First Prize: Joshua Jensen (University of Texas at Arlington)
  • Second Prize: Jason Grafmiller and Stephanie Shih (Stanford)
  • Third Prize: Hannah Haynie (Berkeley)