The Editor's Department: Annual Report

As one of my annual obligations as editor, I am asked, on the occasion of the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January, to file a report with the LSA Executive Committee in which I detail and discuss activities and issues pertaining to the running of the journal, highlight any new developments of note, and generally address any matters that either the Executive Committee or I myself consider to be important or noteworthy in some respect. Following what has become my usual procedure for fulfilling this obligation, I give below, in place of my more usual editorial comments in this section of the journal, my fourth ‘State of the Journal’ report, summing up the events of my fourth year on the job. The version given below is essentially the form in which the report was submitted to the Executive Committee in January, though I have taken the liberty of adding some informational updates in footnotes, correcting some errors, and embellishing and elaborating here and there as appropriate.

Brian D. Joseph
Columbus, Ohio
April 15, 2006

The Editor’s Report

Preamble

During 2005, the fourth year of my seven-year term as editor of Language, I passed the halfway mark of my editorship, and thus I am now on the downhill slope, so to speak, of my service. Even with the start of this downward trajectory in the second half of the year, however, I did not experience a let-down of any sort nor any diminution in the intensity—or excitement—of serving as editor. Indeed in most respects it was a typical year with the journal, that is to say, interesting, stimulating, at times frustrating, but overall very rewarding, and ultimately most satisfying.

In what follows, as is my custom, I survey the events of the year as far as Language is concerned, keeping in mind, as always, just how privileged a position I hold, being associated with such a fine publication.

Language: A numerical overview (and then some)

As in my past reports, I start with a statistical summary of volume 81, ‘Language-by-the-numbers’ as it were, adding some commentary where appropriate. As in any year, four issues of Language appeared, and again, as was the case last year and actually so since the September 2003 issue (79.3), all four issues appeared on time, not only being posted electronically with Project Muse but also being mailed out to subscribers by approximately the middle of each month in which they were designated to appear (March, June, September, and December). We now have our part in the production process, with its main phases of collecting and finalizing publishable versions of papers, copyediting the papers, printing them into Language-formatted pages, and proofreading them, down to a science almost, and we are reaping the rewards of this efficiency in the continued on-time delivery of the finished product. The stream of fine papers into the journal offices (see below for details) continues unabated, so that even as the current issue, volume 81.4 for December 2005, is about to appear as I sit writing this report, all of the papers for the March 2006 issue (volume 82.1) are in production, the June 2006 issue is already full, and the September 2006 issue is half-spoken for, to be filled by the next two final versions of accepted papers that authors send in.¹ There is no shortage of excellent material for the journal, so I anticipate being able to keep the journal appearing on time for the years to come.

These four issues contained 1,056 pages, with 641 pages devoted to 18 articles, 45 to 3 review articles, 80 to 8 discussion notes, 8 to 1 obituary, 100 to 30 reviews, 107 to 148 book notices, and 75 to other sorts of material (letters: 14 pages for 10 letters; Editor’s Department columns: 20 pages for 4 pieces, including the annual Editor’s Report; Recent Publications lists: 19 pages; index: 21 pages; correction: 1 page). The distribution of types of items published and the rough ratios of the different types to one another are comparable to past...