The Mary R. Haas Book Award is presented to a junior scholar for an unpublished manuscript that makes a significant substantive contribution about Indigenous languages of the Americas. The award carries no financial stipend, but the winning manuscripts will be considered for publication under the Society’s auspices in the University of Nebraska Press series “Studies in the Native Languages of the Americas.”
SSILA received a large number of excellent nominations for the Mary R. Haas Book Award this year. As a result, the committee chose to award one winner and three honourable mentions. Please join us in congratulating the following young scholars and their work!
Dr. Amalia Skilton (University of California, Berkeley) has been awarded SSILA Mary R. Haas Book Award for her thesis Spatial and Non-Spatial Deixis in Cushillococha Ticuna. This dissertation is an exquisite piece of work in both methodology and the theoretical contributions. The replicability of the several experiments –both with other Ticuna speakers and cross-linguistically– is a highly desirable feature in the context of the study of Indigenous languages. It also makes important theoretical contributions to the area of semantics and pragmatics of demonstratives, providing evidence that demonstratives encode visibility contrasts. This finding challenges the current dominant view that demonstratives carry information regarding distance but do not encode perceptual deictic content. The study also provides evidence that demonstratives do not contrast necessarily in terms of ‘distance’ between speaker/addressee and referents, but in terms of ‘peripersonal space,’ the space within reach of the speaker.
Dr. Geny Gonzales Castaño (Université Lumière Lyon 2) has received an honourable mention for Una gramática de la lengua namtrik de Totoró - Lengua barbacoa hablada en los Andes colombianos. Her dissertation provides an extremely detailed, comprehensive guide to the Namtrik language as it is spoken in Totoró, a Colombian town within the Cauca district.
Dr. Kelsey Neely (University of California, Berkeley) has also been selected for honourable mention for The Linguistic Expression of Affective Stance in Yaminawa (Pano, Peru). The committee praised this thesis for its comprehensive nature, consisting of both a grammar of Yaminawa with context-rich examples and a detailed study of affective stance, and for its potential broader impacts of the work, particularly with respect to language education.
And finally, Dr. Andrey Nikulin (Universidade de Brasília) and his thesis Proto-Macro-Jê: Um Estudio Reconstrutivo have been selected for honourable mention for the SSILA Mary R. Haas Book Award. His dissertation, drawing on a vast amount of published and unpublished sources, is a remarkable piece of scholarship, and it will serve as a reference for years to come to anyone interested in comparative studies and classification of South American languages.
The winners will be formally awarded at the SSILA Annual Business Meeting on January 9, 2021. SSILA wishes to thank all of the nominators.
Nominations for the Mary R. Haas Book Award are due June 15 every year.