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  • The Editor’s Department: Recognizing a Language great

Over the years, in these columns, I have regularly commented on matters of editorial policy and on details of the history of the journal, and occasionally have added my thoughts on the field. Once in a while too my thoughts have fallen upon some aspect of the content of a given issue. Circumstances dictate that I take this last approach in this quarter’s offering.

With this issue, Language formally and with great sadness acknowledges the passing of a giant in our field who played a key role in the development and history of the journal, just as he did with the development and history of our field. I speak, of course, of Bill Bright, third editor of the journal (from 1966 to 1987), president of the LSA (1989), and a key figure in American Indian linguistics, South Asian linguistics, and general sociolinguistics over a fifty-five-year period.

Bill passed away on October 15 of last year, and while Language cannot recognize every linguist who passes away, not even every major linguist, clearly he is someone who deserves all the recognition Language can muster.1 Accordingly, in this issue, we include an obituary on Bill written by his former student and long-time friend Jane Hill (see pages 628–641). In addition, this issue is formally dedicated to his memory, an honor bestowed only relatively rarely in the history of the journal.2 And in this column I offer some reflections on Bill Bright as an editor of this journal.

Bill was innovative in his shaping of Language, and many features no doubt taken for granted by many readers in recent years are the result of his actions. For instance, he reinstituted the practice of having an abstract with each article, thereby serving well the needs of readers to learn quickly what a paper is about and also obliging authors to attempt to state succinctly what their main point is.3 He also created the Editor’s Department (a feature, I confess, that I have taken rather considerable advantage of), deciding that it would, as he put it in the very first one in December 1981, ‘replace the sporadic “Notes”, of various editorial content, which [had] previously appeared in [that] space’ (Language 57.4.981–82). I am pleased to be continuing his legacy and note particularly that he envisioned there being an Editor’s Department ‘in each issue’, a goal I have striven to fulfill.

One other innovation of Bill’s was the book notice, the history of which I intend to review in greater detail in the next issue but which can be noted briefly here as dating from March of 1977, with the first one appearing in Language 53.1. Bill authored numerous book notices himself over the years, including all twenty in that first issue (spanning pages 257–265). It is thus quite fitting that we publish in this issue, along [End Page 493] with these various tributes to him, his final book notice (see pages 680–681). It reviews a festschrift honoring a former student of his, P. J. Mistry, and thus it was a book of some not inconsiderable personal interest to Bill. The notice was written, quite obviously, when he was still active, and as its introductory paragraph suggests, perhaps now with a bit of irony, it came at a sort of watershed moment for him, when he was reflecting on his life and his longevity in the field.

Many readers of Language will have had some interaction with Bill over the years, whether as a student of his, as a colleague, as an author—prospective or actual—in Language, or even just as a consumer of the fine scholarship he produced in articles and books, not to mention the edited volumes he was responsible for.

On a personal note, my interactions with Bill mostly revolved around Language in some way or other. He was the editor who in 1979 accepted my first major article for publication (‘Language universals and syntactic change’, Language 56.2.345–70, 1980). He was also the editor who, by working with that item and others of mine that...

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