Victoria Fromkin Memorial Prize for Student Excellence in Phonology

About the 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. It will be awarded for outstanding scholarship in phonology by a linguistics graduate student.

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).

The award is given every year, as nominations warrant.

The nomination period opens on February 18, 2025, and closes at 11:59 PM (ET) on June 30, 2025.

To submit a nomination, log into the Member Portal, click 'Access Membership Benefits' and access the nomination form. If you are not a member, join us today to submit a nomination.

Eligibility

  • Nominators and nominees must be current members of the LSA.
  • Nominations of women and individuals from underrepresented ethnic groups are strongly encouraged.
  • The Victoria Fromkin Prize recognizes outstanding scholarship in phonology by a linguistics graduate student.
  • You can nominate yourself or your colleague.
  • US residency or citizenship is not required.
  • A statement in favor of the nominee (100 words or less) from an advisor is required.

The nomination must include a CV, one paper of representative work (a second paper is optional), complete the questions in the nomination form which are:

  • Discussion of significant impact of the nominee's outstanding scholarship in phonology;
  • Discussion of forward-looking and innovative character of the nominee's work in phonology; and 
  • Discussion of empirical rigor of the nominee's scholarship in phonology.
  • The nomination must also include a statement of support from an advisor. 
  • 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. The winner will be recognized at the Awards Ceremony at the next LSA Annual Meeting in January.

Previous Awardees

2024

Katherine Russell was awarded on the basis of the exceptional quality and breadth of her work. Through original fieldwork, corpus studies, and careful, collaborative documentation and description of understudied languages, in particular Paraguayan Guaraní and Atchan, her work has implications for several areas of linguistics, including the typology of harmony, comparative linguistics, and the architecture of grammar. Her innovative corpus-building and corpus-informed analyses of understudied languages serve as a model for other scholars to follow.

2023

Sammy Andersson was awarded on the basis of their important contributions to theoretical phonology and morphology at an early career stage. Andersson's publication record is impressive, with papers published in Glossa and accepted to Phonological Data and Analysis (PD&A) before finishing graduate school. Their work shows breadth, with evidence of excellence in corpus and computational linguistics, phonetics, phonology, morphology, and fieldwork. Their PD&A paper and dissertation show careful empirical work on Abkhaz with significant import for metrical theories, requiring a rethinking of the types of units that can host stress and making a novel series of predictions about stress typology.

2022

Casey Ferrara. Casey Ferrara's work on sign languages recognizes that meaning is encoded in form, and instead of stating that fact and then skirting around it to other matters, she hones in on it, indeed, revels in it -- bringing sign phonology into the waters of phonetics made murky by semantics. She shines lights through this world of strange creatures, like a scuba diver -- lights from mathematics, biomechanics, visual perception, cognitive and dynamic coordination -- allowing her to reveal the phonological patterns and help the field of sign phonology swim forward.