Two students and a professor from the School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics were recognized at the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) 2024 meeting in New York City this month.

Silvina Montrul, a professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, received the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award.

The award is named after linguist Leonard Bloomfield and is given to a book that has made an "outstanding contribution of enduring value" to our understanding of language and linguistics.

The selection committee wrote: “We were impressed with [Dr. Montrul's] approach to heritage language from an integrated perspective that draws from psycholinguistics, morphosyntactic theory, sociolinguistics, and language variation and change. The empirical materials on differential object marking are exceptionally rich, and the conclusions are strengthened in connection with and comparison to first and second language acquisition, to which the author has also been a leading contributor. The recognition of the heritage speaker’s native linguistic competence has considerable social and educational implications beyond the traditional boundaries of linguistics.”

Luis David Gaytán-Soto, a master’s student in Spanish, and Allison Casar, a PhD student in linguistics, were also recognized at the LSA 2024 meeting.

Gaytán-Soto received a Committee on Ethnic Diversity (CEDL) Travel Grant to attend the meeting in New York, while Casar received the inaugural Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics (COGEL) Travel Award to attend.

These awards are intended to increase the participation of ethnically diverse and gender-diverse student members in LSA meetings. Awardees get the opportunity to engage with linguistic research and to network with other researchers and peers.

Gaytán-Soto was one of only three award recipients, and Casar was one of only two winners.