The IACL Awards

The Young Scholar Award (YSA) competition is an innovative attempt by the IACL to promote, recognize, and encourage scholarship by young scholars. A "young scholar" is someone who is 35 years of age or below and whose current rank is below that of associate professor in the Chinese and American university systems and below that of senior lecturer in the British system. Only members of IACL are eligible to participate in the competition; non-members must be prepared to join IACL at the time of participation.

The YSA competition is held once a year in conjunction with the IACL annual conference. A call for papers is issued by the IACL conference organizer, normally with a deadline earlier than the usual conference abstract deadline. Participants are each required to submit a full paper of not more than 25 pages in length to the Organizing Committee, attaching a letter giving his or her age and present academic rank. All submissions for the YSA competition must be original papers that have not been published, accepted for publication, or presented at a major conference and to appear in its proceedings. Previous award winners are not allowed to re-enter the competition. The same paper cannot be re-submitted.

All papers submitted for the YSA competition are subject to review by a Review Committee appointed by the IACL President. A maximum of 5 (normally 2-4) Finalists will be selected, each awarded a travel subsidy (of around $500) and invited to the IACL Conference to make an oral presentation at a special session organized for this purpose, before a Panel of Judges chaired by the IACL President. (The Review Committee of any given year may also recommend that no Finalist be invited.) The author of the best paper selected by the Panel will be honored at the banquet of the annual conference and presented with an Award Certificate.

Launched in conjunction with the 1994 Annual Conference in Hong Kong, the YSA has been awarded to the following young scholars:

1994  (during ICCL-3 in Hong Kong):

Thekla Wiebusch, University of Göttingen
Paper presented: “Quantification and Qualification: Two Competing Functions of Numeral Classifiers in the Light of the Radical System of Chinese Script”

 Min Zhang, National University of Singapore
 Paper presented: “Lexical Perspectives in Syntactic Change”

 Jowang Lin, National Chiaotung University, Taiwan
 Paper presented: “Distributivity in Chinese and Its Implications”

 Yung-Li Chang, National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan
 Paper presented: “Verbal Agreement in Seediq and Kavalan and Its Typological Implications”

Zhongming Chen, University of California, Berkeley
Paper presented: “Lun Suzhou Hua Rencheng Daici de Yuyuan [On the Origin of Personal Pronouns in Suchou]”

Chun Fat Lau, Polytechnic University of Hong Kong
 Paper presented: “Hanyu Fangyan de Fenlei Biaozhun yu Kejia Hua zai Hanyu Fenlei-shang de Wenti [Criteria of Classification in Chinese Dialects and the Problems of Hakka in a Chinese Dialect Grouping]”

2001 (during IACL-10 at Irvine, California):

Shengli Zu, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Paper presented: “Yuandai Baihua Beiwen de Zhiyiti Tezheng [The Characteristics of the Metaphrasal-style documents in Beihua Beiwen (vernacular inscriptions on tablets) in Yuan Dynasty]”

Xiu-zhi Zoe Wu, University of Southern California
Paper presented: “ The Re-grammaticalization of Suffixes: Verbal '-le' as Aspect and Tense”

2002 (during IACL-11 at Nagakute, Japan):

Zev HANDEL, University of Washington
Paper presented: “Northern Min tone values and the reconstruction of 'softened initials' ”

2004 (during IACL-12 at Tianjin, China):

Yeshes Vodgsal Atshogs, Nankai University
Paper presented: “Yuyan shendu jiechu jizhi yu zang-han yuyan leixing chayi wenti” (required font)

2006 (during IACL-14 at Taipei, Taiwan):

Jie Zhang , University of Kansas
Paper presented: "Contour Restrictions and Faithful Alignment in Chinese Tone Sandhi Systems."

2007 (during IACL-15 at New York, USA):

Ivy Chenqing Song , University of Wiscosin-Madison
Paper presented: Stop Codas in Old Chinese and Proto Sino-Tibetan: A Lexical Diffusion Analysis

王偉, CASS, China
Paper presented: 如何區分 "了1" 和 "了2"

Mantaro J. Hashimoto Award for Chinese Historical Phonology: Guidelines

This new award is an annual prize in the amount of US $500, donated by Professor Anne Yue in memory of the eminent linguist and Sinologist, Professor Mantaro J. Hashimoto. It is offered as an encouragement to young scholars who wish to devote themselves to the study of Chinese historical phonology, a field in which Professor Hashimoto was especially interested and to which he made numerous important contributions.

The prize will be administered as part of the Young Scholar Award process. All YSA papers submitted in the field of Chinese historical phonology will automatically be concurrently considered for the MJH Award. Applicants should follow the published YSA guidelines in preparing their submissions. All regulations, restrictions, selection criteria, and judging standards current in the YSA process will apply to papers considered for the MJH Award, with the exception that MJH submissions must deal specifically with the area of historical phonology.

The first competition for the MJH Award took place as part of the YSA competition at the 11th Annual Conference of the IACL, which was held from August 20-22, 2002 in Nagoya (Nagakute), Aichi, Japan

The winner of 2004

Yeshes Vodgsal Atshogs, Nankai University
Paper presented: “Yuyan shendu jiechu jizhi yu zang-han yuyan leixing chayi wenti” (required font)

This new award is an annual prize in the amount of US $500, established in the honor of Professor Hsin-I Hsieh for his immense contributions to the IACL and to the field of Chinese Linguistics. The award is offered as a token of encouragement to young scholars who wish to devote themselves to interdisciplinary studies in Chinese linguistics, a direction that POLA (Project on Linguistics Analysis) at University of California at Berkeley has pursued since the 1970’s. The prize will be administered as part of the Young Scholar Award (YSA) process. All papers with an interdisciplinary approach submitted for YSA will automatically be concurrently considered for the POLA Award.

Applicants should follow the published YSA guidelines in preparing their submissions. All regulations, restrictions, and selection criteria adopted in the YSA process will apply to papers considered for the POLA Award, with the exception that submissions for the POLA Award must have an interdisciplinary focus, which includes interface studies (phonology-syntax, morph-syntax, syntax-semantics, etc.), studies which combine diachronic and synchronic approaches, those that combine methodologies from different frameworks (formal, functional, typological, etc.), or those that combine linguistics and other disciplines (literature, anthropology, sociology, psychology, computer science, etc.).

The first competition for the POLA Award will take place as part of the YSA competition at the 16th annual conference of the IACL, which is to be held in 2008 at Peking University, Beijing, China.