Outstanding Undergraduate Dissertation in Linguistics

Since 2017, the LAGB has awarded three prizes annually for outstanding dissertations or long-form essays in any subfield of linguistics written by undergraduates. Each prize consists of a £100 cash award and one year's free membership of the LAGB.

The LAGB invites each UK university with an undergraduate teaching programme in linguistics to nominate one undergraduate dissertation or long essay, which may be on any topic within the field of linguistics. The submission should be a major, original pieces of undergraduate work. As a rough guide, we expect submissions to be around 8,000 words in length (equivalent to a 25-page article in Journal of Linguistics), but longer or shorter submissions will be accepted, as we recognise that different programmes have different requirements. The fundamental criteria are originality and excellence.

The extended deadline for nominations for this year is 5th August 2024.  The nomination email should include as attachments: (1) a PDF of the dissertation or long essay, and (2) a completed version of the nomination form, available for download here. Programmes may determine their own process for choosing which dissertation or long essay to nominate.

The LAGB committee will choose 3 winners from the submissions. Each winner will receive a £100 cash prize as well as a free one-year LAGB membership. Winners are usually announced in September. All nominated students will be recognised (along with the winners) on the LAGB website, subject to the students' consent.

Questions should be sent to Andrew Nevins, Assistant Secretary.

Winners and shortlists

2024

May Sodhi (UCL) for An analysis of the distribution and meaning of the Tangut morpheme tśhji

Anonymous (University of Edinburgh) for Transpositional and Post-Transpositional Phonologies of Whistle Languages


2023

Whitall (Cambridge) for “The draft didn’t save!” a syntactic-semantic investigation of computing-related verbs in English

Ziegler (QMUL) for Number marking on nouns in Shilluk

Sun (UCL) for Investigating the Potential of Boolean Monadic Recursive Schemes in Syllable Typology


2022

Cliodhna Hughes (University of Edinburgh) for Evidence in Support of a Cognitive Bias for Cross-Category Harmony between the Verb Phrase and the Adpositional Phrase in the Absence of Surface-Level Patterns

Giulia Li Calzi (University College London) for When I’m 25, I will... The effects of developmental language disorder on children’s future narratives

Daniel Price (Queen Mary University London) for Conceptual Metaphors of Anxiety 

Eve Whitaker (Newcastle University) for Investigating the effect of frequency on the acquisition of superiority effects in multiple interrogatives using an agent-based model 

Shortlisted students: Antonia Gentgen (University of Kent), Ciorstan Towers (University of Aberdeen), Rose Martin (Manchester University) and Génesis Vizcaíno Mendoza (University of Westminster).


2021

Katie Goddard (University of Edinburgh) for Assessing New Entropy-Based Tools for Readability Assessment

Ariwan Suhairi (University of Cambridge) for Modelling unnatural classes of harmonic vowels in substance-free phonology

Siena Weingartz (University of Manchester) for Analysing comparative and superlative constructions in Ndebele, a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa

Gloria Yu (University College London) for The influence of sentence context on the categorical perception of English stop VOT in individuals with a high Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ)

Shortlisted students: Chloe Chiu (Ulster University), Jessica Harbord (Newcastle University), Lauren Moult (Queen Mary University of London), Fred Whibley (University of York).


2020

Imogen Davies (University of Cambridge) for The use of 'as' as a post-adjectival intensifier in British English

Alisha Hixson (University of Essex) for The development of the perception of native allophones in children aged 6-15 years-old

Alvin Tan (University of Oxford) for Copula Constructions in Colloquial Singaporean English 

Adam Timol (Queen Mary University of London) for The effects of cognitive stress on lexical retrieval

Shortlisted students: Dakarai Bonyongwe (University of Kent), Hannah Fern (University of Edinburgh), Lena Horak (University of Manchester), Francesco Pili (Newcastle University), Sarah Powell (Ulster University), Holly Shorey (University of York), Flavio Spadavecchia (University of Aberdeen).


2019

Rebecka Elm (University of Edinburgh) for The Diachronic Development of Substitutive DO in Old to Middle French and Middle English: A Comparative Study Using Parsed Corpora

Katie Gascoigne (University of Leeds) for The Effects of Accent Familiarity on Lexical Processing

Justin Malčić (University of Cambridge) for The Asymmetry and Antisymmetry of Syntax: A Relational Approach to Displacement

Shortlisted students: Thea Graves (University of Nottingham), Julia Hebron (University of York), Barnaby Murray (University College London), Evelyn Williams (University of Aberdeen). 


2018

Sana Kidwai (University College London) for Case-(Mis)Matching in Urdu Sluicing

Eloisa Lillywhite (University of Kent) for Whose Body is it Anyway? A Corpus Study of Transgender Representation in Children's Fiction

Tamisha Tan (University of Cambridge) for Verb-Copying Resultatives in Colloquial Singapore English

Shortlisted students: Kinza Akbar (University of Sheffield), Oliver Rainford (University of Aberdeen), Abby Weilding (University of Leeds). 


2017

Sarah Asinari (Queen Mary University of London) for Case Syncretism in Russian Numeral Constructions

Charlotte Liu (University College London) for It’s all Cantonese to me: Designing a non-word repetition set for Cantonese

Huinan Zeng (University of Sheffield) for The underspecification of the [CORONAL] feature: A study on the perception of word-medial mispronunciation in Mandarin

Shortlisted students: Charlotte Bush (Lancaster University), Georgia-Ann Carter (University of Kent), Samuel Crowe (University of York), Jonne Kramer (University of Westminster), Elliott Land (University of Huddersfield), Marilena Onisiforou (University of Manchester), Oliver Sayeed (University of Cambridge).


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