Richard M. Hogg Prize

ISLE offers an annual Richard M. Hogg Prize for a paper on any research-related topic in English language or English linguistics. Please see below for submission criteria, and for prize recipients.

Richard M. Hogg Richard M. Hogg

Richard Hogg was Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Manchester from 1980 until his death in 2007. He was the General Editor of The Cambridge History of the English Language (6 vols, 1992-2001), one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics, and well known for his work on Old English, on phonology, and on English dialects. Click here to read an obituary by Nigel Vincent in The Guardian. A complete list of Professor Hogg's publications is now available. His Grammar of Old English, 2, Morphology, was completed by Rob Fulk and published in 2011, and a collection of essays in his honour, Analysing Older English, was published in 2012.

Recipients

Congratulations to:

2023** no winner
honorable mention: Pablo Ramón Ramos
Attention to diversity in bilingual education: Stakeholders’ perceptions in a bilingual region
2022 Elen Le Foll Schulenglisch: A multi-dimensional description of the variety of English taught in German schools
2021 James Stratton Where did wer go? Lexical variation and change in third-person male adult noun referents in Old and Middle English
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  Honorable mention:
Rhys Sandow
Interpreting identity effects in sociolinguistic variation and change: The role of identity in the usage and recognition of Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis
2020 Raquel Romasanta Negation as a predictor of clausal complement choice in World Englishes
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  Honorable mention:
Maryam Nasseri
Is postgraduate English academic writing more clausal or phrasal? Syntactic complexification at the crossroads of genre, proficiency, and statistical modelling
2019 Katharina Pabst Is [nuz] really the new [njuz]? Yod dropping in Toronto English
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2018 Joseph Pentangelo Phonesthetics and the etymologies of blood and bone
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2017 Rebecca Woods Towards a model of the syntax-discourse interface: A syntactic analysis of please
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2016 Robert Fuchs Near-mergers in postcolonial varieties of English: The /v/-/w/ contrast in Educated Indian English
2015 Martin Schweinberger The discourse particle eh in New Zealand English
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2014 Alison Biggs Passive variation in the dialects of Northwest British English
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2013 Axel Bohmann Nobody canna cross it: An interactional perspective on discourse in motion
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2013 Elspeth Edelstein Adverb climbing as evidence for the structure of non-finite complements in English
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2012* no winner
honorable mention: Justyna Rogos
Isles of systematicity in the sea of prodigality? Non-alphabetic elements in manuscripts of Chaucer's 'Man of Law's Tale'
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2011 George Walkden The status of hwæt in Old English
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2010 Márton Sóskuthy Analogy in the emergence of intrusive-r in English
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2009 Andrew Weir Subject pronoun drop in informal English
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2008 Rhona Alcorn To him vs. him to: The variable syntax of pronominal prepositional objects in Old English
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**Discussing the submissions received in 2023, the prize committee decided not to award a prize for this year. It agreed that the submission by Pablo Ramón Ramos (University of Jaén, Spain) stood out for its interesting analysis of the perspectives of educational stakeholders on CLIL as implemented in several schools in a bilingual region in Valencia and deserved an honourable mention.
*Discussing the submissions received in 2012, the prize committee decided not to award a prize for this year. It agreed that the submission by Justyna Rogos (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland) stood out for quality and originality and deserved an honourable mention.  

Eligibility

The Prize will be awarded in open competition. The competition is open to any individual who is both:

  1. an early-career scholar, defined as a registered student not yet in possession of a doctoral degree, or a post-doctoral scholar within two years of the award of the doctorate at the time of submission; and
  2. a member of the Society (membership can be applied for at the time of submission).

It is expected that most candidates will be students on a doctoral degree programme (PhD) or recent graduates of one, but undergraduates and master's students are not precluded from submitting a paper. Joint or multiple authorship is acceptable so long as all authors meet the two conditions above. Authors should submit a letter from their supervisor, or from a person of similar standing, attesting to their status and that the submission is their own work.

The paper

Candidates may write on any research-related topic in English language or English linguistics. In awarding the prize the committee will take into consideration the originality of the submitted paper and the theoretical and/or empirical contribution it makes to the discipline.

The paper should not have been published before (except possibly in a departmental working paper or the like), nor should it have been submitted for publication elsewhere. It should not exceed – but need not be as long as – 10,000 words in length including tables, figures, notes, appendices, references, etc. It is recommended that authors follow the PDF style sheet available by clicking the link, which is essentially that of the journal English Language and Linguistics and which in turn incorporates the Unified Style Sheet for linguistics journals; a suitable EndNote style for users of the EndNote bibliography program is also available for downloading.

Submission dates and address

The closing date for the 2024 Richard M. Hogg Prize is 15 June 2024. Submissions should be written in English and should be accompanied by the letter mentioned under 'Eligibility' above. Submissions should be sent as a file attachment in an email to the Secretary of ISLE, secretary@isle-linguistics.org.

Prize

The winner will receive a cash prize of £500 and their essay will be published on the ISLE website. Additionally, the winner will be encouraged to submit the prize-winning paper - revised where appropriate in line with judges' or referees' comments - for competitive review for publication in a journal closely associated with the aims of the Society. If no submission is judged suitable, the prize will not be awarded. The prize will be awarded by ISLE on the recommendation of a prize committee formed from senior members of the Society, with a member of the Executive Committee in the chair. The winner will be announced on the Society's website by 1 September. The prize committee's decision is final.

Donors

Contributions to the prize fund in memory of Richard Hogg are welcome. Please click here for a simple payment form (pdf format) which can be printed off, completed and mailed. Payment is possible by cheque, credit card or inter-bank transfer.

The following individuals and organisations have contributed or promised donations to the prize fund:

  • Ronald White
  • Susan Auty
  • Barbara Lewis and Alec Smalley
  • Helen Maclean
  • collection made at church
  • anon.
  • Nigel Vincent
  • Geoff and Helen Easton
  • Charles C. Cui
  • Pauline Maclaran
  • anon.
  • Carolyn and Colin Campbell
  • Cambridge University Press
  • Tony Crowley
  • Christian Kay
  • Olga Fischer
  • Meg Laing
  • anon.
  • Betty Phillips
  • Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell
  • anon.
  • Nuria Yáñez-Bouza
  • David Denison
  • Richard Dance
  • Margaret, Daniel, Robert and Charlie Hogg
  • Patrick Honeybone
  • Bas Aarts
  • Karen Corrigan
  • Emma Banister

See also