I am delighted that the American Dialect Society awarded the “Roger Shuy Best Paper in American Speech Award for 2020'' to

Jim Wood, Raffaella Zanuttini, Larry Horn and Jason Zentz` (2020) “Dative Country: Markedness and Geographical Variation in Southern Dative Constructions'', American Speech 95.1: 3-45.

My interest in linguistics arises from the fact that it studies a component of human nature with methods that approach scientific rigor. I feel privileged to study an aspect of the human mind that is still largely mysterious, the knowledge of language, and enjoy the challenge of trying to model it using a theoretical framework that is still developing, the generative framework.