The Philological Society’s Robins Prize is once again an all-Oxford success story in 2025, with a current and a former LPP DPhil student sharing the award.
The joint winners are AHRC-funded DPhil student and former Ertegun scholar Frances Dowle (co-supervised by Louise Mycock and David Willis) and recent graduate and former Clarendon scholar Chen Xie (DPhil 2024, supervised by Louise Mycock). The winners were announced at the PhilSoc Annual General Meeting, which was held at Somerville College on 7th June 2025. Chen is now a lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University and was not able to attend; Frances was present to receive her prize.
The R. H. Robins student Prize, named after former PhilSoc President Professor R. H. (“Bobby”) Robins, is awarded for an article on a linguistic topic that falls within the area of the Society's interests. The two papers were chosen as joint winners for their detail and high quality, with Chen’s submission (Word order variation as differential object marking) being praised for its typological comparative approach and Frances’ work (Neutral forms of be as default forms: The utility of underspecification and blocking in a Welsh morphosyntactic phenomenon) recognised for its formal theoretical Lexical Functional Grammar implementation.
Chen and Frances follow in the footsteps of previous Oxford winners Sarah Turner (2004) and Emily Lindsay-Smith (2020), previous Oxford runners up Helen Sims-Williams (2014) and Amanda Thomas (2020), and LPP colleagues and previous winners Louise Mycock (2006) and Charlotte Hemmings (2014).