S.-Y. Kuroda Prize 2017
The 2017 SIGMOL S.-Y. Kuroda Prize is awarded to James Rogers (Earlham College).
James Rogers’s 1998 book, “A Descriptive Approach to Language-Theoretic Complexity”, was the first comprehensive work to apply monadic second-order logic to the analysis of linguistic theories. Among other things, it showed that almost all of the principles of Government and Binding Theory of English syntax can be defined in the language of MSO, with the consequence that this portion of the GB theory of English generates a context-free string language. This book and his other publications in the same decade helped establish model-theoretic syntax as a central tool in the mathematics of language. Nowadays model-theoretic methods in general and MSO in particular inform not only research in the realm of syntax, but also in phonology.