The Editor’s Report

[The following is a slightly modified version of the annual report about Language for 2015 submitted by the editor, Greg Carlson, to the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America for its consideration at its January meeting.]

Changes

In 2015 the editorial team was joined by Line Mikkelsen, University of California at Berkeley, and by Grant Goodall, University of California at San Diego, as associate editors; we are grateful to Claire Bowern who extended her three-year term of service as associate editor for one additional year. Departing were Jim McCloskey and Elsi Kaiser, with many thanks for their superb service to the journal.

During 2015 a search was conducted for a new editor of Language. The search did not yield a successful outcome, and the search will continue into 2016. Greg Carlson, the current editor, agreed to extend his term of service for an eighth year through 2016 in order to provide an orderly transition in journal leadership.

2015 was also executive editor Stan Dubinsky’s last of his three-year commitment to the journal. Stan’s contributions to the journal have been more enormous than one might realize, and we all owe him much gratitude for all he has done. He has worked very hard and very consistently, and has reaffirmed the highest standards in both assessing article contents and executing reviewing procedure. His position, under a different title, will be occupied by Megan Crowhurst of the University of Texas.

This past year was also our first full year of experience with the OJS online submission and review system, and its continued development in service of the LSA remains underway. More importantly, we continued to lay the groundwork for making the transition at some future point to becoming a fully electronic journal, among other things exploring the possibility of publish-in-advance-of-print within the current publishing framework. In the coming year, in addition to the online-only sections, we are going to publish all replies online, and we anticipate moving more of the present paper issue contents to the electronic medium only in the coming year. As we deal with the matters of electronic publication, journal and LSA leadership continue to consider the best possible way to accommodate open access aspirations consistent with the Society’s financial resources.

Finally, longtime journal assistant Kerrie Merz has chosen to step down and will be replaced by Erica Dayton for the coming year. I cannot say enough good about Kerrie’s efforts over the past seven years and so will not try. The continued exceptional work of copyeditors Hope Dawson and Audra Starcheus deserves special recognition.

Language by the numbers

Volume 91 of Language for the year 2015 consists of four issues comprising 981 pages. The print volume contains 23 articles, 1 review article, 2 obituaries, and 20 book reviews.

Our online-only sections published an additional 14 pieces (208 pages), as follows:

• • Historical Syntax: 1 article

• • Perspectives: 4 response articles

• • Phonological Analysis: 3 articles

• • Replies: 5

• • Teaching Linguistics: 1 book review

Papers submitted in 2014–2015

In all, the journal received a total of 184 submissions, 43 of which were to the online-only sections, and the remaining 141 to the print journal. By way of comparison, 160 manuscripts were submitted to Language during the same time period the previous year. Topic areas of the papers submitted to the main section of the journal were distributed approximately as given in Table 1 (note: resub-missions are not counted separately from initial submissions).

Table 1.

Submitted articles by area of specialization.

Decisions

Of the papers acted on in 2015, the print journal accepted 21 articles, declined 87, and asked for revision and resubmission of 29. The online-only sections accepted 8, declined 8, and asked for revisions and resubmission of 6 more.

Special thanks

The editors wish to thank the following 165 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).

• Jun Abe

• Peter Ackema

• John Alderete

• Theodora Alexopoulou

• Scott AnderBois

• Lieselotte...