LSA Executive Director Alyson Reed presented the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 2018 to Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania) at a special awards ceremony held in Philadelphia on March 23rd. Dr. Yang was unable to attend the official awards ceremony held earlier this year at the LSA's Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City. The event in Philadelphia was held at the 42nd Penn Linguistics Conference on the University's main campus. Dr. Yang's book, The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language was published by the MIT Press. 

The citation presented to Dr. Yang, along with a framed photo of Bloomfield, reads as follows: "Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language is a highly original, very readable book of wide interest to linguists of all subfields and theoretical frameworks.  It uses computational efficiency to relate the number of exceptions a rule can tolerate to the number of regular tokens.  The critical threshold decreases as the tokens affected increase, so a striking conclusion is that exceptions are learned best when the total vocabulary is small – an empirical answer to how children easily acquire with minimal input rules that stump adult learners.  The book has potentially profound implications for historical linguistics and language change as well."