Letters to Language

Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.

Omission in a review

February 11, 2010

To the Editor:

In my review of Bruce Hayes’s Introductory phonology (Blackwell, 2008), which appeared in Language 85.4.937–39 (2009), I neglected to mention Iggy Roca and Wyn Johnson’s 1999 book A course in phonology, also published by Blackwell. The omission was entirely unintentional.

Maria Gouskova
[maria.gouskova@nyu.edu]

Language and the LSA

May 20, 2010

To the Editor:

The LSA has been a big disappointment to me over the past decade. I am sad to say that I will no longer remain a member of this society, which provides fewer benefits of the membership dues than many other academic societies.

Let me consider a few of the other societies of which I will gladly remain a member. The Acoustical Society of America provides a subscription to their monthly journal, a benchmark journal in acoustics that publishes several hundred articles per year. If a paper is judged worthy of publication and has the right scope, then it is worthy of publication in the Journal of the ASA; it’s as simple as that. As a bonus, members receive the monthly magazine Physics Today (which is nice for those linguists with a physics degree like myself) and the quarterly magazine Acoustics Today. ASA membership dues are $115 per year. The Association for Symbolic Logic, for $82 per year, provides members with subscriptions to three refereed quarterly journals, which together publish many dozens of papers per year, including expository and historical papers. The Cognitive Science Society, for $75 per year, provides members with sub-which together publish dozens of papers on all aspects of cognitive science.

And then we have our LSA. For $95 per year, members are treated to perhaps two dozen research papers per year. I hope I won’t insult our distinguished authors when I say that these papers are not worth $4 each to me. Language publishes around the same number of linguistics articles as it did decades ago, while the number of linguists who could contribute to it has increased tenfold. I believe that Language made a tactical error years ago, when it was decided to try to publish only the highest quality papers of general linguistic interest, keeping the journal small. In his Editor’s Department column, Brian Joseph (Language 78.2) quoted former Editor Sally Thomason, who had held that ‘all subfields and all theoretical approaches are appropriate … however, articles are appropriate for Language only if they hold potential interest for linguists in all subfields of the discipline’ (p. 218). Joseph later elaborated in Language 78.4, saying, ‘the paper must … discuss material that (nearly) every linguist should know about or would have an opinion on … authors need to make clear why their work … speaks to an issue that ought to command the attention of practicing linguists’ (p. 616). This editorial stance had the effect of reducing the journal’s content to only those papers that 90% of linguists can understand, while simultaneously restricting publication to papers that could command the attention of every linguist. This is a tall order indeed, so the journal also lost its most important function, to be a repository of current research in linguistics. Instead, it has become more of a highlights section along the lines of journals like Science; I do not believe that this is what the LSA should be providing members with.

I hope that the current LSA members see fit to change the LSA into a more useful society that provides its members with, among other things, a comprehensive journal commensurate with the size of the annual dues.

Goodbye and good luck,

Sean A. Fulop
[sfulop@csufresno.edu]