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  • Canadian Linguistics Association National Achievement Award 2011

The Canadian Linguistics Association is pleased to present Shana Poplack with a Canadian National Achievement Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the discipline.

Born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in New York City, Shana Poplack received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, where she studied under William Labov, founder of variationist sociolinguistics. Her ground-breaking Ph.D. dissertation, based on the language use of New York City Spanish/English bilinguals of Puerto Rican descent, proposed universal principles of intra-sentential code-switching, a framework against which all competing theories are still measured.

Shana Poplack took up a position in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa in 1982 and soon embarked on a major corpus-based study of Ottawa-Hull French, which became a methodological model for variationist sociolinguistics. Another methodological innovation which grew out of the Ottawa-Hull project involved the development of quantitative diagnostics for distinguishing single-word code-switches from borrowings, the object of longstanding debate in language contact research. The Ottawa-Hull study revealed important insights about bilingual language use, showing for example that the effects of language contact are much more tightly constrained than had previously been thought. It also provided a wealth of information about the present-day structure of Laurentian French. Her more recent corpus, Récits du français québécois d'autrefois, a collection of spoken-language data from speakers born in the 19th century, adds an important diachronic dimension to this strand of her research program.


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Shana Poplack, winner of the 2011 National Achievement Award

Over the years, Professor Poplack has worked on diaspora varieties of African-American English, a number of Hispanic vernaculars, Brazilian Portuguese, and Quebec English, along with a wide variety of [End Page 445] other languages, looking at variation and change in morphology, syntax and phonology. She has been a prominent contributor to the African-American "origins" debate, providing evidence, some from Nova Scotia Black English, for the substantial English contribution to the formation of AAE. A major theme of her research has been the careful delineation of the importance of functionalist constraints on variation and change, resulting in a series of publications which seamlessly integrate variationist methodology with linguistic theory.

Professor Poplack's research has been disseminated in the major journals for sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and general linguistics and in important anthologies. She is the author of three books and the editor of four others. Her research is frequently reprinted and widely cited, and she is much in demand worldwide as a keynote speaker: by way of example, a quarter of her more than 250 presentations have been plenary addresses. Another testament to the quality of Professor Poplack's research is uninterrupted research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada over a period of almost thirty years.

She has also played a leading role in the training of the next generations of sociolinguists. She is the founder and director of the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory, rivalled only by Labov's University of Pennsylvania Sociolinguistic Laboratory in terms of its impact on the field. Professor Poplack has directed the work of more than 50 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, a list which includes some of the leading sociolinguists in Canada and abroad. Several of her former students have held offices in the Canadian Linguistic Association, and they, among other former students, have themselves become leaders in the field. The Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory has also hosted a wide array of visiting scholars from other institutions world-wide, which has made an important contribution to the dissemination of the methodology and theory of variationist linguistics.

Professor Poplack's stellar career has been recognized in the form of a Canada Research Chair, Tier 1 (2001), the Killam Prize (2007), a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship (2007), and the Ontario Premier's Discovery Award (2008). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998 and a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2009. We are pleased to add to this truly impressive list a Canadian Linguistics Association National Achievement...

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