Language (journal)

Infobox Journal
title = Language


editor = Brian D. Joseph
discipline = Linguistics
abbreviation =
publisher = Linguistic Society of America
country = United States
frequency = Quarterly
history = 1925 - present
openaccess = http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language
website = http://www.lsadc.org/info/pubs-language.cfm
link1 =
link1-name =
link2 =
link2-name =
JSTOR = 00978507
OCLC = 50709582
LCCN = 2002-227129
ISSN = 0097-8507
eISSN = 1535-0665

Language is the official peer reviewed journal of the Linguistic Society of America, published since 1925. It is published quarterly and contains articles and reviews on all aspects of linguistics, focusing on the area of theoretical linguistics. Its current editor is Prof. Brian D. Joseph (Ohio State University).

Under the editorship of the renowned Yale University 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.

The most famous article to appear in "Language" was the scathing 1959 review by the young Noam Chomsky of the book "Verbal Behavior" by the behaviorist cognitive psychologist B. F. Skinner. This article, perhaps the most influential book review of the 20th century, 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 followed by two years another book review that is almost as famous - the glowingly positive assessment of Chomsky's own 1957 book Syntactic Structures by Robert B. Lees that put Chomsky and his generative grammar on the intellectual map as the successor to American structuralism.

"Language" continues to be an influential journal in the field of linguistics: it is ranked sixth of 47 in the Linguistics category (and first among journals publishing theoretical work in linguistics) in the Thompson ISI citation index (2006), with an impact factor of 1.79 and a half-life of more than 10 years [http://scientific.thomson.com/isi/] .

Older issues of the journal (1925-2001) are available online with subscription via JSTOR.

External links

* [http://www.lsadc.org/info/pubs-language.cfm Official home page of Language]
* [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/language Open Access of Language since 2001]