We were utterly delighted to learn that our brilliant 2017 PhD alum Juliet Stanton, now an Assistant Professor at New York University, has won the very first Morris Halle Memorial Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology, awarded by the Linguistic Society of America.
Morris Halle, of course, was the co-founder (with Noam Chomsky) of MIT Linguistics, one of the most important progenitors of modern phonology, and our beloved colleague and friend, sorely missed. We could not be more thrilled that one of our own, thus an institutional as well as intellectual descendant of Morris, was chosen as the first recipient of this award in his memory. To quote the citation from the LSA:
“First established in 2021, the Morris Halle Award for Faculty Excellence in Phonology will be used to defray expenses associated with participation in the LSA’s Annual Meeting. It is to be awarded for outstanding scholarship in phonology by an early career faculty member in linguistics. With this award, the LSA recognizes in Stanton’s research the linguistic spirit of Morris Halle: her work is fundamental and far-reaching, rigorous and comprehensive, deep and broad. She leads the field in redefining what it means to do Phonology. By combining analysis with experiments and computational modeling in the service of theory, she has reinvigorated the field of phonological typology. By exhausting the available data, she sets a new bar for empirical depth. All those that worked with Morris will be hearing in their heads his voice proclaiming, ‘You gotta read this paper by Juliet!’ Congratulations on this well-deserved honor.”
Congratulations indeed!