''Language'' is a

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

quarterly

academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...

published by the Linguistic Society of America since 1925. It covers all aspects of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, focusing on the area of

theoretical linguistics Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics that, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to the theory of language, or the branch of linguistics that inquires into the ...

. Its current

editor-in-chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The editor-in-chief heads all departments of the organization and is held accoun ...

is Andries Coetzee (

University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

). Under the editorship of Yale linguist Bernard Bloch, ''Language'' was the vehicle for publication of many of the important articles of American structural linguistics during the second quarter of the 20th century, and was the journal in which many of the most important subsequent developments in linguistics played themselves out. One of the most famous articles to appear in ''Language'' was the young

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

's scathing 1959 review of the book ''Verbal Behavior'' by the behaviorist cognitive psychologist B. F. Skinner. This article argued that behaviorist psychology, then a dominant paradigm in linguistics (as in psychology at large), had no hope of explaining complex phenomena like language. It was followed two years later by another book review that is almost as famous— Robert B. Lees's glowingly positive assessment of Chomsky's own 1957 book '' Syntactic Structures'', which put Chomsky and his

generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

on the intellectual map as the successor to American structuralism. By far the most cited article in ''Language''Joseph, B. D. 2003. "Editor's Department: Reviewing Our Contents". Language 79 (3): 461-463. is the 1974 description on the

turn-taking Turn-taking is a type of organization in conversation and discourse (linguistics), discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. In practice, it involves processes for constructing contributions, responding to previous com ...

system of ordinary conversation by the founders of conversation analysis—

Harvey Sacks Harvey Sacks (July 19, 1935 – November 14, 1975) was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a ...

, Emanuel Schegloff, and

Gail Jefferson Gail Jefferson (22 April 1938 – 21 February 2008) was an American sociologist with an emphasis in sociolinguistics. She was, along with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, one of the founders of the area of research known as conversation anal ...

. This article describes the socially normative system of rules that accounts for the complex turn-taking behaviour of participants in conversation, demonstrating the system in detail using recordings of actual conversation. ''Language'' continues to be an influential journal in the field of linguistics: it is ranked twenty-fourth out of 184 in the "linguistics" category in the 2018 ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publication by Clarivate. It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science Core Collection. It provides information about academic journals in the natur ...

'', with an impact factor of 1.899.

References

External links

*
''Language''
at Project MUSE Linguistics journals Academic journals established in 1925 Quarterly journals English-language journals Linguistic Society of America {{ling-journal-stub