February 9, 1998 Contact: Jamie Lawson Reeves (615) 322-2706 jamie.l.reeves@vanderbilt.edu

Vanderbilt University linguist

receives national book award

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Alice C. Harris, professor of linguistics and chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages, has been awarded the Linguistic Society of America's fourth Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for a recent work on linguistic change.

Harris authored "Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective" (Cambridge University Press, 1995) with co-author Lyle Campbell, a scholar at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Harris, also a professor of anthropology, and Campbell were honored for their book during the Linguistic Society of America's annual meeting Jan. 8-11 in New York City. It was selected from more than a dozen submissions authored by members of the society and published between 1995 and 1997.

The biennial award recognizes the book that has contributed the most to the development of the understanding of language and linguistics. The book award committee called the book a "benchmark work in syntax and historical linguistics."

In this major work, Harris and Campbell set out to establish a general framework for the scholars and students investigating linguistic change.They drew on languages as diverse as Pipil and French, Georgian and Estonian.

A specialist in historical linguistics, Harris has conducted extensive fieldwork on a variety of non-Indo-European languages in several parts of the Caucasus, a region between the Black and Caspian seas that includes Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and part of southwestern Russia.

The Linguistic Society of America was founded in 1924 for the advancement of the scientific study of language. The society serves its nearly 7,000 personal and institutional members through scholarly meetings, publications and special activities designed to advance the discipline.

-VU-

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