English 401Ron StricklandSept. 8, 1999Critical Summary of Journals in LinguisticsIn a sense, the academic field of linguistics is only about 100 years old--at least that's when the field began to take on the "scientific" orientation in which its scholarship might be recognized today. And Anglo-American scholarship in linguistics is of even more recent provenance. I will discuss some of the key contemporary journals that publish scholarship in English in the field below (much important linguistics research is published in other languages). But first, it is necessary to mention the historical linguistics of the 19th century, which preceded modern linguistics. Unlike modern linguistics, which is concerned with describing and analyzing language patterns and their relationships to thought and communication in a setting isolated from historical change, 19th-century historical linguistics was preoccupied with tracing the geneaologies of modern languages to their pre-historic origins. After Saussure's structuralist intervention--after his argument that language must be looked at in a synchronic rather than a diachronic view in order to understand how meaning is made--historical linguisticswas generally ruled out of the discipline. Modern linguistics research divides along the lines described by Finegan--between those anthropological linguists and sociolinguists for whom "languages are quick studies in the social structures of human communities andthe mainstay of social interaction" and those cognitive linguists and psycholinguists for whom "Language is primarily a facet of the human mind" (Gibaldi, p. 3). I will give a brief historical overview of academic journal scholarship in linguistics and then provide brief abstracts of several prominent journals in the field. Here I am reviewing only relatively "pure" linguistics journals; that is, I have not considered journals that focus mainly on applied linguistics or those focusing on linguistic issues in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages.Historical OverviewAcademic journal publication of scholarship in linguistics dates back to the nineteenth century, when research in historical linguistics was a prominent feature of some of the oldest scholarly journals in English studies, such as PMLA, Studies in Philology, and Philological Quarterly. After Saussure, scholarship in linguistics generally moved in a new direction. In place of the emphasis upon tracing the geneaologies of languages and uncovering linguistic evidence from earlier historical periods came an emphasis upon the ways languages operate to produce meaning. Linguists developed an interest in the actual physical processes of the production of language (phonetics, etc.) and in the relationships between language and thought (cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, syntax, structure, grammar, etc.) and between language and communication (sociolinguistics, syntax and structure again, etc.). These new concerns are reflected in the mission statements of new professional organizations such as the Linguistics Societyof America , "founded in 1924 for the advancement of the scientific study of language," according to the masthead of its journal, Language. That the LSA emphasizes the "scientific study of language" is significant; the society was at pains to distinguish its research from that of the earlier generation of linguists, who were now seen as quaint andamateurish. Another significant expansion in linguistics scholarship occurred in the late 1950's and early 1960's, fueled by the revolutionary theories of Noam Chomsky and by the infusion of massive government support for linguistic research as a side-effect of the cold war. Journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, published at MIT and recognized as the pre-eminent organ of Chomskyan theory, and Journal of Linguistics, the journal of the Linguistics Society of Britain, were founded during this period. Journals: Language Language is the official publication of the Linguistics Society of America. As I mentioned above, the society was founded on the heels of the Saussurean revolution, "forthe advancement of the scientific study of language," and its editorial profile continues to follow that lead. The editor's annual report for 1999 asserts that the journal attempts to publish "the best of what is new in the field" and to represent "the breadth of the field . . . (in terms of both areas and ideology)." The editor goes on to concede that "the one area that is clearly underrepresented is abstract deductive formal syntax, but we cannot publish what we do not receive." I think these observations reveal several things about the journal. First, that Language conceives its identity as a rigorously scientific journal inthe paradigm of the empirical sciences is suggested by its emphasis on new research, rather than, say, making itself a forum for critical debates on issues in the field. When theeditor mentions "ideology," then, I think he is using the term loosely and colloquially to refer to different theoretical orientations within a relatively narrow discursive disciplinaryfield. The different areas he mentions would include topics in the traditions in strictly "scientific" linguistics such as phonology, syntax and semantics. Featured articles in the June 1999 issue showed a heavy emphasis upon syntax with titles such as "Explaining Article-Possessor Complementarity: Economic Motivation in Noun Phrase Syntax," "Processing Complexity and Filler-Gap Dependencies Across Grammars," "Revisiting Tungusic Classification from the Bottom Up: A Comparison of Evenki and Oroqen," and The Grammaticalization of the Proximative in Tok Pisin." The book review section of the journal includes reviews of books on sociolinguistics and comparative linguistics, but these topics are not generally found among the journal's feature articles.Journal of LinguisticsJournal of Linguistics is the official journal of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. It was founded in the mid-1950's and is published by Cambridge University Press. According to the journal's website (http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/) the journal "is concerned with all branches of theoretical linguistics, including syntax, morphology,phonology, phonetics, semantics, pragmatics and historical, sociological, computational, psychological and applied aspects of language and linguistic theory." However, it seems to be more concerned with theoretical linguistics