2016: Dr. Paweŀ Rutkowski

The inaugural Adam Kilgarriff Prize was awarded to Paweł Rutkowski. Dr. Rutkowski is head of the Section for Sign Linguistics at the University of Warsaw, and leads the team developing the corpus of Polish Sign Language and the corpus-based Dictionary of Polish Sign Language.

The Prize was awarded to Paweł for his outstanding work on this project, and it was officially presented at the recent eLex 2017 conference in Leiden. We were delighted to welcome Gill Lamden, Adam’s wife, to say a few words and present the winner’s cheque. Paweł then went on to give one of the keynote talks of the conference – a fascinating and entertaining introduction to the work of the Section for Sign Linguistics, from which we all learned a great deal. His talk was simultaneously interpreted by Lissa Zeviar, in International Sign Language, and it was also live-streamed. A video of the talk is now available on the eLex YouTube channel.

The eLex site hosts the abstract of Paweł’s lecture, and he has also written a short article, titled “The Corpus of Polish Sign Language and the Corpus-based Dictionary of Polish Sign Language’ for the 2017 edition of Kernerman Dictionary News. During the conference, Paweł was interviewed by Victoria Nyst, on behalf of the language-research journal Slovenščina 2.0. The interview has now been published in the first volume of the journal.

Michael Rundell, on behalf of the Trustees