Israel Prize: Winner announced
Israeli Minister of Education Naftali Bennett has announced that Prof. Edit Doron a professor in the Department of Linguistics and at the Language, Logic and Cognition Center in the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.will be awarded the Israel Prize for her work in the study of Linguistics.
Edit Doron Photo: Hebrew University
Established in 1953, the Israel Prize is considered Israel’s highest honor and is awarded to Israeli citizens or organizations that have displayed excellence in their field or contributed significantly to Israeli culture. The award will be presented at an Israel Independence Day ceremony in May attended by Israel’s president, prime minister, Supreme Court president and other national leaders.
The president of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Prof. Menahem Ben-Sasson, said: “Prof. Doron has earned a place of honor by advancing our understanding of how we use language, and in particular the revival and evolution of the ancient Hebrew language in the modern era – a topic dear to our hearts at the Hebrew University.”
Education Minister Naftali Bennett congratulated Prof. Doron and added: “The Hebrew language developed and renewed itself from generation to generation, yet remains as fresh as ever, just like the nation that speaks it, the only nation that has maintained its language and culture for thousands of years.”
In its recommendation of Prof. Doron, the Israel Prize Committee said: “Prof. Edit Doron is a researcher at the forefront of linguistics research in Israel and the world, both in general and in formal linguistics, as well as in Hebrew and Semitic languages. Her research deals with a wide range of linguistic phenomena in a variety of languages. In her groundbreaking research she discovered new phenomena in spoken Hebrew today, and in classical Hebrew. Insights from these studies comprise a basis for research in numerous languages studied by the international scientific community. In recent years she turned to understanding the processes that influenced the formation of Modern Hebrew, and in this field she shows how it has evolved a natural evolution of the previous language combined with the great effect of the linguistics of its speakers.”
Prof. Doron was appointed to the Hebrew University in 1985, after being awarded a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University in 1984-85. She served as President of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics in 2008-2010, and is currently co-director of the joint Hebrew University and Tel-Aviv University structured Linguistics PhD program, and co-editor of several international Linguistics journals. She has published many articles on the interface of semantics, morphology and syntax. The main languages she has worked on are Hebrew (with special emphasis on the historical ties of Modern Hebrew to Classical Hebrew), Arabic, Aramaic, English and French.
