Zhiguo Xie, Assistant Professor of Chinese in DEALL, was awarded the prestigious Young Scholar Award by the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) at its 21st annual conference, held on June 7-9, 2013 in Taipei, Taiwan. The award recognizes Professor Xie’s theoretical research on the interaction of possessive verbs and degree constructions. He is the first and only recipient of this award since 2010, after three consecutive years with no awardees. In addition, he was shortlisted for the same award in 2009, when he was a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell.

IACL holds three international award competitions each year in conjunction with its annual conferences, which are hosted by different institutions around the globe. The YSA award that Professor Xie received was created in 1994 to “promote, recognize, and encourage scholarship” by researchers of Chinese linguistics under 35 years of age and below the rank of associate professor. The other two, equally coveted, prestigious awards are the Mantaro J. Hashimoto Award for Chinese Historical Phonology, and the Interdisciplinary Research Award.