Reviews and review articles in Journal of Linguistics

[Borsley, Bob]

I am writing to invite people working in HPSG to contribute a review or a review article to Journal of Linguistics, a journal of which I am one of the editors. If there is some book that you need to read anyway, why not tell the linguistic world what you think of it, especially if it is particularly interesting, particularly good, or particularly bad? We get relatively few reviews by people working in HPSG. The following is one very good example:

Bender, E. M. (2002), Review of Martin et al (eds) Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, Journal of Linguistics 38, 432–439.

It would be good to have more like this. Reviews are generally no more than 2,000 words in length. If there is something you might be interested in reviewing, please contact me.

There is also the possibility of writing a review article for the Journal. This is a more substantial piece of work, which doesn’t just summarise the content of the book and provide an assessment of it. Rather it seeks to take the debate forward in some way, and it is potentially as important as an ordinary article. As with a review, a review article may be quite positive about the book that it is concerned with or quite negative. The following is a good example of the first type:

Koenig, J-P. (2004), Any questions left? Review of Ginzburg & Sag's Interrogative investigations, Journal of Linguistics 40, 131-148.

The following is more like the second type:

Asudeh, A. and I. Toivonen  (2006), Symptomatic imperfections, Journal of Linguistics 42: 395-422.

Another difference between a review article and a review is that review articles are refereed. However, there is no question of a commissioned review article being rejected. Again if there is a book or books that you might be interested in doing a review article on, you should contact me.

Bob Borsley