Spanish and linguistics professor Silvina Montrul recently received two major honors.

Her book "Native Speakers, Interrupted" (Cambridge University Press, 2023) has been selected as the winner of this year’s Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistics Society of America.  

This award is named after linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who taught German at the U of I from 1910-1921, and is given to a book that has made an "outstanding contribution of enduring value" to our understanding of language and linguistics.

The selection committee wrote, “We were impressed with [Dr. Montrul's] approach to heritage language from an integrated perspective that draws from psycholinguistics, morphosyntactic theory, sociolinguistics, and language variation and change. The empirical materials on differential object marking are exceptionally rich, and the conclusions are strengthened in connection with and comparison to first and second language acquisition, to which the author has also been a leading contributor. The recognition of the heritage speaker’s native linguistic competence has considerable social and educational implications beyond the traditional boundaries of linguistics.” 

She will receive the award at the annual Linguistics Society of America Conference in January 2024 in New York City. 

Montrul was also recently ranked in the top two percent of the world's scientists, according to Stanford University.

Stanford updated its "World's Top 2% Scientists" list for 2023 this fall. This prestigious ranking is based on the bibliometric information in the Scopus database and includes more than 190,000 researchers from all over the world out of about 9 million scientists, with 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields taken into account.

The university's own Silvina Montrul is listed at number 94, out of a sublist of 399 for linguistics.

Dania De La Hoya Rojas, Department of Linguistics