Linguists win Book Prize
A book written by two Lancaster University professors has been awarded a £1,000 prize by the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA).
Style in Fiction by Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short (Longman, 1981) was selected by PALA as "the most influential in stylistics or the linguistic study of literature in the past 25 years".
The competition, to mark PALA’s 25th anniversary, set out to find the most influential book published since 1980 in the area of stylistic analysis or the linguistic analysis of literature.
In the period running up to the annual PALA conference in Huddersfield in July, stylisticians around the world were invited to send in their nominations. Taking these nominations and statements into account, the PALA committee selected a shortlist of five books, and voting for the final winner took place at the conference.
The shortlisted books were:
- Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics edited by : Ron Carter and Paul Simpson.
- Linguistic Criticism by Roger Fowler .
- Style In Fiction by Geoffrey Leech & Michael Short.
- A Dictionary of Stylistics by Katie Wales.
- Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse by Paul Werth.
The winner was announced at the PALA AGM on Thursday, July 21, 2005 by the PALA Chair Isil Bas. PALA will hold a symposium at Lancaster in December to discuss the book and developments since its publication. Professors Leech and Short have decided to contribute the prize money to a fund that awards bursaries to students wishing to attend PALA conferences.
For more information on the prize go to www.pala.ac.uk
For further information on the authors go to: http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/geoff/geoff.htm
or http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mick/mick.htm