The Editor's Report

[The following is a slightly modified version of the annual report about Language for 2012 submitted by the editor, Greg Carlson, to the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America for its consideration at its January meeting.]

Changes

The board of associate editors saw the departure of Harald Baayen, Jen Hay, and Jason Merchant and the addition of Claire Bowern, Elsi Kaiser, Michael Cysouw, and James McCloskey. In 2012 associate editors for the new online-only sections to begin in 2013 were appointed by the LSA Executive Committee. These are Anne H. Charity Hudley and Kazuko Hiramatsu (for 'Teaching Linguistics'), Eric Bakovic, Gene Buckley, and Matt Gordon (for 'Phonological Analysis'), and John Baugh and Donna Christian (for 'Language and Public Policy').

Language by The Numbers

Volume 88 of Language for the year 2012 consists of four issues comprising 949 pages. The volume contains 19 articles, 10 discussion notes, 1 short report, 1 letter, and 55 book reviews.

Papers submitted in 2011-2012.

In all, including articles, short reports, and discussion notes, 124 new submissions were received between November 16, 2011, and November 15, 2012. This is down slightly from the previous year. Topic areas of the 117 submitted articles were distributed as given in Table 1.

Table 1.

Submitted articles by area of specialization.

Total papers acted on in 2011-2012.

Including papers submitted the previous year, but still pending action as of November 15, 2012, a total of 129 papers were acted on between November 16, 2011, and November 15, 2012. In all, 16 papers were accepted, 9 were accepted with minor revisions, 36 were returned for revision with suggestion to resubmit, 67 were rejected, and 1 was withdrawn. The percentage accepted rate of all papers acted on in 2012 is about 19 percent.

The length of time between submission and decision for that time period ranged from one week to 59 weeks; the average time to decision was 30 weeks. As of late 2012 the position of executive editor was created primarily to address this continuing issue; Prof. Stanley Dubinsky of the University of South Carolina now serves in that capacity.

Referees.

Referee reports were submitted by 186 different scholars this year. People serving as referees are listed and officially thanked at the end of this report.

Agenda for 2013

The primary task is to implement decisions made in 2012 about moving Language toward being a digital rather than a print journal, and to publish in the new online-only sections. Efforts are underway to integrate planning for the journal's development with changes to the LSA's website. Details are available on the LSA's website (http://www.linguisticsociety.org/lsa-publications/language). In addition, in 2013 we expect time to decision to come down markedly.

Special Thanks

Many thanks to associate editors: Adam Albright, Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Claire Bowern, Michael Cysouw, Heidi Harley, Elsi Kaiser, Lisa Matthewson, James McCloskey, Shana Poplack, and Kie Zuraw.

A special thank you to book editor Natsuko Tsujimura for her work, especially for getting the book notices regularized and tending to the backlog we had experienced over the past few years. This required a special long-term effort.

Hope Dawson and Audra Starcheus deserve special recognition for their essential, continued work in copyediting and proofreading. Thanks to Kerrie Merz in the journal main office for her tireless work. They have all continued to go above and beyond in the past year; the LSA remains fortunate to have such a team supporting the journal.

The editors wish to thank the following individuals who generously agreed to contribute their time and effort to the essential task of refereeing submissions (* indicates that the individual was responsible for more than one report).

• Barbara Abbott

• Farrell Ackerman

• Judith Aissen

• Akinbiyi Akinlabi

• Adam Albright

• Edith Aldridge

• Alex Alsina

• Stephen R. Anderson

• Helga Anetshofer-Karateke

• Mark Aronoff

• Peter Bakker

• Colin Bannard

• Chris Barker

• Robert Bayley

• David I. Beaver

• Benjamin Bergen

• Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero

• Jean-Yves Béziau

• Paul Boersma

• Olivier Bonami

• John Bowers

• Patrick Brandt

• Benjamin Bruening

• Deborah Burke

• Joan Bybee

• Anna Cardinaletti

• Sandra Chung

• Ariel M. Cohen

• Bernard...