The Editor's Department: Reviewing Our Contents

Just a few months ago, as this issue was taking shape, there arrived on the scene a new item in the Language ‘family’ of publications: the Twentieth-century index, a listing of works published in Language in the twentieth century. This impressive tome, 597 dense pages long, was edited by Meghan Sumner and my predecessor, Mark Aronoff. It covers the first seventy-six years of Language, 1925 to 2000, thus all of the volumes (1 through 76) of the journal that appeared in the twentieth century. In it are listed the authors who have published in Language, the articles (regular, review articles, discussion notes, etc.) that they have published (listed by title), the books that have been reviewed (listed separately by book author, by title, and by review author), and occasional other items (e.g. obituaries, authors’ responses to reviews, and the like). A technological marvel, made possible by optical character recognition software, it is based on the fifty-year index produced in 1975 and the subsequent ten-year index covering 1975 to 1984, augmented with the material from each annual index published at the end of each volume since 1985.

The availability¹ of this useful tome has led me to some observations on the wide range of items published in the journal, the breadth of coverage given to the field, and the various linguists whose work has been showcased in the pages of the journal. For instance, working just from the first word of titles,² one sees that languages from Akkadian to Zuni and topics from A-bar syntax to the Zweite Lautverschiebung of Germanic are represented; moreover, Language has published articles by scholars from Aarsleff (Hans) to Zwicky (Arnold) and has reviewed books by authors from Aalto (Pentii) to Zyar (M. A.)—all in all, a veritable Who’s who of linguistics. Further, the listings permit some interesting glimpses into aspects of the history of the discipline and the journal; Roland Kent (president of the LSA in 1941), for instance, has by far the most entries as author, with nearly four and a half pages filled primarily with listings of obituary notices and book reviews but with several articles as well (mostly on his specialty, Old Persian), and William Bright (past editor of this journal and inventor in 1977, starting with volume 53, of the Book Notice)³ is a close second, with almost four pages filled with numerous book notices but with some articles too. The material also allows for the formulation of Language trivia: the most common first word of a title, for instance, is ‘On’ (found in some two-pages’ worth of entries, and appearing first chronologically in ‘On a case of Indo-European suppletive suffixes’ by Maurice Bloomfield in Language 1.88–95 (1925)); the most common first word in book titles is ‘Language’ (covering nearly eight pages of entries); and, as best I can tell (there is no clear search algorithm that gives this at present), the longest article is ‘Ergativity’ by R. M. W. Dixon (Language 55.59–138 (1979)).

Looking through this volume has also led me to ponder the question of which papers qualify as the best, the most important, or the most influential that have been published in the pages of Language. Surely if this is one of the leading journals in the field—and for a long time, after all, it was one of the few—then its articles ought to have had an impact on scholarship in our discipline.

I have my personal favorites: Leonard Bloomfield 1925 (‘On the sound-system of Central Algonquian’, Language 1.130–56), with its immortal statement about the regularity of sound change,⁴ is one, as is his brief 1928 follow-up piece (‘A note on sound-change’, Language 4.99–100) with its further endorsement of the notion of regular sound-change;⁵ I would add as well James McCawley 1970 (‘English as a VSO language’, Language 46.286–99), a paper that contains intriguing argumentation and that had at the time of its publication an edgy and iconoclastic feel to it (never mind that it is clearly dated...