The Editor's Department: Language in the 21st century: An assessment and a reply

Over the holiday break this past December, while catching up on some reading, I had occasion to read Thomas Friedman’s very interesting article ‘It’s a flat world, after all’ (New York Times Magazine, April 3, 2005 (clearly I had a lot of catching up to do!), pp. 33–37). The author talks about how technology has ‘flattened’ things out, with so many people now being connected to ‘all the knowledge pools in the world’ and thus working, even as individuals, in virtual far-flung teams potentially spanning the globe.

This article came to my attention within a few weeks of my receiving Stephen Levinson’s thoughtful and provocative letter (pp. 1–2 in this issue), and thus not long after I had prepared my annual report for the LSA (to be published in the June issue) in which I held forth about where the journal had been in the previous year and where it is going in the current year. These three things—the article, the letter, and the report—converged in an intriguing way, for the different pieces resonated with one another, and together they led me to the musings contained in this column.

I have used this space in a variety of ways over the past few years, ranging from discussing details of the editorial process and of journal policy to elucidating aspects of the history of the journal, and against advice, even pontificating (though I prefer to say ‘stating my views’) on directions in which the field and the journal are headed. Stimulated by the aforementioned convergence, and by way of offering some response to the telling points Levinson (hereafter L) raises in his letter, I include here a mix of comments on all of these topics.

L makes several observations and claims, all of which mostly boil down to a single issue: Language, he says, is not reflective of the vibrancy of our field. In support of his case, he draws attention to the following: too few articles are published each year; they do not come out in as timely a manner as is desirable; certain policies do not square with the reality of who is writing linguistics articles these days; book reviews and book notices no longer serve a useful function; and material supporting and, importantly, supplementing published analyses is not readily available, for example, electronically via internet sites.

Moreover, these characteristics, he says, are not consistent with directions in which the field should be moving in the twenty-first century, where rapid access to information (note Friedman’s ‘pools of knowledge’) on the part of individuals and groups of scholars is increasingly critical to making advances in the sciences in general, and including our science of language.

To a large extent, L is absolutely right, and it is certainly the case that in this, the sixth year of the twenty-first century, it is not unreasonable to expect Language to be current with the times. Indeed, something can be done, and in fact is being done, about it.

Before detailing these ameliorative steps, even at the risk of adding some suspense, let me point out one aspect of L’s argument that is clearly supported by facts from the history of the journal and especially its recent history. Multiple authorship, which he refers to in the context of a suggestion that present Language policy about multiple concurrent submissions by the same person is outmoded, indeed has become far more prevalent. While it is true that the first coauthored paper in Language occurred as early as 1927,¹ multiple authorship as reflected in the pages of the journal is far more common now than ever before. A trend in this direction is shown dramatically by a comparison of the ‘paper-to-author’ ratio (number of papers published versus number of authors for all of the papers) across several arbitrarily chosen years at twenty-year intervals, representing the ‘olden days’ (1935), what might be termed the beginning of the modern era (1955, immediately pregenerative), the thick of the generative era (1975), and a more recent point (1995); the relevant statistics are...