2009 DSCA Winner: Herbert Clark

Herb Clark’s empirical and theoretical contributions to the psychology of language and discourse are wide-ranging, important, and enduring. His early work on sentence comprehension and memory, bridging inferences, and linguistic processes in deductive reasoning is seminal. His 1977 textbook with Eve Clark, Psychology of Language, remained, for decades, a definitive overview of the field. Likewise, his 1996 monograph, Using Language, is a classic, as are numerous handbook chapters. More recent work on politeness, speech acts, and referring has led to his well-known collaborative theory of language, challenging much traditional work in psycholinguistics. Herb Clark is an inspiring mentor. Many of his students and postdoctoral researchers have made substantial contributions to the field of text and discourse. Perhaps most remarkable about Herb Clark’s work is its reception in many fields of inquiry beyond psycholinguistics, promoting progress in human-computer interaction, social psychology, communication, and linguistics. Herb Clark’s work demonstrates an unparalleled appreciation of both the cognitive and social dimensions in language.

2009 DSCA Winner: Herbert Clark