The 2007 ALT Awards

Mon Nov 27 08:10:32 UTC 2006

The Joseph Greenberg Award 2007

The Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT) will be continuing its Junior
Award for the best piece of typological research embodied in a doctoral
dissertation or equivalent. The next round of these awards, to be decided
for the Paris meeting of the ALT next year, will be for a thesis accepted
between 1 January 2005 and 31 December 2006. The award will consist of
payment of travel, per diem expenses and registration fee to attend the ALT
VII Conference, to be held in Paris, September 25 to September 28, 2007, and
to present a synopsis or element of the prize-winning work as a plenary
lecture at that meeting. From 2007 this Award will be known as the Joseph
Greenberg Award, in honour of the late Joseph Greenberg's fundamental
contributions to typology and the interest he showed in encouraging young
researchers.

To be eligible, those submitting their manuscript must be members of the
ALT. They are asked to submit their dissertation by email in pdf format,
with all non-standard fonts in Unicode, to the Chair of the Jury, to arrive
no later than February 1 2007. If this proves technically difficult, the
candidate is asked to discuss the problem with the chair. 

A jury, consisting of 5 ALT members, will be appointed by ALT's President,
appropriate to the work submitted. The chair will be

Eva Schultze-Berndt 
Linguistics
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
Merangasse 70
A-8010 Graz
Austria

Schultze-Berndt at ling.uni-graz.at

For information on the ALT (and on joining) consult:

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/alt/

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The Panini Award 2007

ALT is proud to announce the establishment of a new grammar prize to
encourage and honour achievements in the field of documenting the world’s
linguistic diversity through the writing of reference grammars. To be
eligible, a grammar must provide a systematic, accessible, comprehensive,
original, insightful and typologically well-informed account of the workings
of the language being described, generously exemplified with natural data.
Though the normal expectation is that it would deal with a hitherto
little-described language, outstanding grammars of better-known languages or
dialects thereof may also be considered if they achieve major breakthroughs
in a comprehensive understanding of the language. Grammars may be written in
any major language, subject to the availability of a sufficient and
geographically balanced set of jury members able to read the language.  

Entries will be judged by a committee of half-a-dozen distinguished
linguists, including a number of judges who have themselves written major
reference grammars but also typologists and other categories of
grammar-reader. The chair of the jury will be nominated before the
submission date by the President of the ALT, in consultation with the
Executive committee, and the chair and the president will then constitute
the jury once the full set of submissions is known.

The ALT grammar prize will be awarded every two years, with the winner
announced in time for them to present a plenary lecture or language tutorial
at the next ALT Conference, setting out the most typologically interesting
aspects of the language. 

There will be two categories of prize, on alternating four year cycles –
one, to be known as the Panini Grammar Award, for grammars written as
dissertations, and one, to be known as the Georg von der Gabelentz Grammar
Award, for published grammars.

For each category, any grammar (respectively) passed as a dissertation or
published in the four year period leading up to December 31st in the year
preceding the ALT Conference, will be eligible provided that it meets the
conditions above and that the author is a member of the ALT. Grammars which
win the Panini award cannot be submitted at a later date for the Gabelentz
award. Six copies of the entry must be submitted to the Chair of the Jury by
February 1st of the year following the four year period. In the case of the
Panini award only, entries may be submitted as a pdf file with embedded
fonts, except that submission of bound copies is preferred in the case of
countries such as the Netherlands where a form of non-commercial publication
is a requirement. Submitted copies remain the property of the members of the
jury. It will normally be the responsibility of the applicant to cover the
costs of submitting their work, but the Chair will consider applications for
assistance in the case of demonstrable financial hardship. It is planned
that the initial award would be made in 2007, in the Dissertation category.
Marianne Mithun has kindly agreed to chair the first Panini award, and
anyone wishing to be considered should send their entries to her address:

Marianne Mithun

Dept of Linguistics

University of California at Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara, CA 93106
USA

mithun at linguistics.ucsb.edu

Prize winners for the Panini award will receive a paid fare to and
accommodation and registration at the ALT conference at which they will
present their plenary, as well as a collection of reference grammars and
other works donated by major publishers in the area. Because of current
financial limitations on the ALT Budget, Prizewinners for the Gabelentz
award will not receive a paid fare to the ALT conference, but other
conditions will be identical. 

For information on the ALT (and on joining) consult:

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/alt/

Johan van der Auwera

johan.vanderauwera at ua.ac.be

 <http://webhost.ua.ac.be/vdauwera/> http://webhost.ua.ac.be/vdauwera/