First call: Panini Award 2011

[Jean-Christophe Verstraete]

The Panini Award 2011

At the 9th Biennial Conference in Hong Kong (July 21-24 2011), the
Association for Linguistic Typology will award its second Panini prize,
for a grammar passed as a dissertation between January 1st 2007 and
December 31st 2010. The Panini award was established 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. In order to be eligible for the
prize, the author must be a member of ALT.

Entries will be judged by a committee of half-a-dozen or more
distinguished linguists, including a number of judges who have
themselves written major reference grammars but also typologists and
other categories of grammar-readers. The chair for the 2011 award will
be Keren Rice.

Entries are normally submitted as a PDF file with embedded fonts. The
deadline for submission is December 31st, 2010. Any questions about
submissions should be directed to the chair.

Prize winners for the Panini award will receive a paid fare to and
accommodation and registration at the ALT conference in Hong Kong, as
well as a collection of reference grammars and other works donated by
major publishers in the area. They will also present a plenary lecture
setting out the typologically most interesting aspects of the language.

The address for submissions for the 2011 Panini award is:

Keren Rice
Department of Linguistics
University of Toronto
Sidney Smith Hall
100 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5S 3G3
<rice at chass.utoronto.ca>