The Linguistics Association of Great Britain is happy to announce the outcome of the competition for the Anna Siewierska Prize 2013, for the best essay by a student or recent graduate on a topic in linguistics.

The deadline for submission was 1 November 2013. It has taken some time to reach a verdict. All submissions were sent to two expert readers, and we didn't want to take a decision before reviews were available for all papers. We would like to make use of this occasion to thank all reviewers for their excellent work, without which we wouldn’t have been able to run this competition.

We received papers of very high quality this year, and the final decision was a close-run thing. The outcome of the competition is as follows:

Winner

Georg Höhn (Cambridge) – Deriving the Basque locative anomalies: The size of spell-out domains in the extended nominal projection

Runners-up

Alison Biggs (Cambridge) – Passive variation in Northwest British English

Catherine Laing (York) – Learning to talk within the framework of Dynamic Systems Theory: Categorisation and re-organisation in phonological learning


A quote from a review of the winning essay:

“[The essay] has all the ingredients of an excellent paper: descriptive detail, thorough and detailed analysis, and theoretical insight. It does a very good job in discussing the relevance of well-known puzzles in the description of Basque to current theoretical issues in syntax and morphology, and in providing an original solution to these puzzles that is grounded in current theorizing.”

The value of the prize is £500. The winning entry can be found here and will be forwarded by the committee with their endorsement to the Journal of Linguistics.

The Anna Siewierska Prize will be awarded again in 2016 (submission 2015). In the interim the Philological Society runs a competition for the eighth RH Robins Prize (the two prizes are awarded in alternating years).