Editors’ Note

After six years of working together as coeditors of the Journal of English Linguistics, we find ourselves composing our final editors’ note. As is true of so many things in our lives and careers, it is hard to believe that six years have gone so quickly. These have been rich and rewarding years of work for both of us, and we indulge in some reflections on the experience later in this note. But first we want to highlight the contributions of the pieces in this issue.

The three articles in this issue of the journal compare and contrast different approaches to linguistic data, relying on theoretical, analytic, and methodological comparison to provide new insights into debates within morphosyntax, lexical semantics, and sociolinguistics. First, in her article, “-Ness and -ity: Phonological Exponents of n or Meaningful Nominalizers of Different Adjectival Domains?” Heike Baeskow engages in a broader theoretical debate concerning whether such suffixes constitute phonological outputs of abstract syntactic nodes or whether such suffixes draw on both syntactic and semantic information. By illustrating that the semantic differences between -ness and -ity must rely on a historically driven semantic distinction, Baeskow comes down on the side that these suffixes are both morphosyntactically and semantically motivated rather than being phonological reflexes of abstracted syntactic nodes.

Matt Davies’s article, “A New Approach to Oppositions in Discourse: The Role of Syntactic Frames in the Triggering of Noncanonical Oppositions,” relies on national news reports of protest marches to illustrate how the context of occurrence for specific syntactic frames (e.g., ‘between X or Y’) function to trigger both canonical (e.g., ‘dead/alive’) and noncanonical oppositions (e.g., ‘cream/spleen’) within a text. Framed in terms of lexical semantics, the study examines how syntactic frames, particularly those that are linked to noncanonical oppositions, contribute to ideological positions that construct binary oppositions within a text that are not already entailed in the lexical semantics. In so doing, Davies also deftly illustrates how both qualitative and quantitative analytic models can usefully be applied to issues relating to lexical semantics.

The last research article in the issue examines the validity and usefulness of using self-reported questionnaires as a source of data about sociolinguistic variation and change. In “The Written Questionnaire as a Sociolinguistic Data Gathering Tool: Testing Its Validity,” Stefan Dollinger compares written questionnaire data to recorded examples for two phonological features and shows that written questionnaires can be quite reliable sources of data as long as the researcher bears in mind that such sources are not well suited to exploring phonetic nuance.

Finally, in his arresting In the Profession column, Walt Wolfram calls on those of us working in the discipline to be much more mindful of the opportunities that exist to engage with the public—work that helps sustain the discipline, but more important, work that allows public interest in human language to be fostered and engaged by those who specialize in it directly. As he writes, “If linguists firmly believe that understanding the nature of language is a central theme in understanding human cognition and behavior, then we owe it to the profession to have more of a presence in public life.” We could not agree more.

In fact, one of the ways in which we have done a small version of that kind of work has been through editing this journal, a tenure that comes to an end with this issue. Editing a journal is not something that senior scholars generally advise newly tenured faculty to take on, and indeed both of us were advised against taking this step. We are delighted that we did not take that advice because our experience with the journal, and specifically with individual authors, reviewers, Editorial Board members, journal editorial assistants, and colleagues at the journal’s publisher, SAGE, has been transformative for both of us. We were able to try some new experiments in academic journal publishing, and two of those, our In the Profession column and our year-end interview with a prominent scholar in the field of English linguistics, have been more successful than we initially imagined. Each of us regularly hears from colleagues how much they enjoy and look forward to these features. It has been quite a pleasure to be involved with bringing forth these types of scholarly and professional reflections within the context of academic publishing and thereby show that academic scholars can speak both outside the academy as well as across disciplinary boundaries. Publishing outside the box in these ways has been enormously gratifying, and we wholeheartedly believe it has made a difference to our field.

We also find that these features have been important for helping the journal be a site of community and particularly of a community that can be simultaneously focused in its orientation and yet expansive in its approach. By publishing across theoretical and methodological subdisciplines, such as history of English, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and dialectology, we found that the conversations within the journal were enhanced. We could publish highly specialized articles without being a highly specialized journal. We wanted the journal to become a space where each reader could find something of interest, and we feel fortunate to have largely met that goal.

All that said, there is still room for improvement in some areas. In particular, we are regularly struck by the lack of resources faced by many scholars working broadly within World Englishes, a lack that frequently results in scholarship that is either outdated in its theoretical approach or too anecdotal in its methodology to become an effective publication. We hope that as a community we are able to seek solutions to this problem faced by our colleagues. We also have mixed feelings about having moved the journal into an online management system, which we did in 2009. While doing so has made managing many aspects of the journal much easier, it has also made some of the work involved less personal. We are very pleased about Online First, which offers public access to final versions of journal articles before official publication. We feel, as do many of you, the tangible loss of hard-copy reprints being sent to our authors. We are sorry that SAGE decided to discontinue that practice, even as we understand their reasons for doing so.

In the course of editing the journal, we have been enormously impressed by and grateful for the generosity, intellectual and otherwise, of the people who agree to review for us. While no two reviewers approach the responsibility in exactly the same way, the vast majority of our reviewers put significant amounts of time, energy, and care into their thoughtful, constructive, and often brilliant advice. Across the board (and this is not the case with all journals), our reviewers have been deft at identifying problems with manuscripts and even better at helping point to solutions. We have been equally impressed with the grace with which authors interact with the intellectual conversation. Working with such careful scholars has been humbling and has also illustrated for us—in a way we would have missed had we not been editing the journal—the serious intellectual conversation that goes on behind the scenes of every published piece of scholarship. Most of us experience the scholarly conversation through published work. We have been privileged enough to experience it at every stage.

For us personally, coediting the journal has strengthened our professional and personal relationship with one another. Collaborating on the journal led to other collaborations for us, such as in the classroom and in opportunities for institutional and disciplinary service. Doing so also helped reinforce for us the critical role of collaborative decision making. Our decisions have been better because we brought two perspectives to every review and four to every article. The editorial assistants who worked for the journal during our joint tenure also enhanced our decisions and facilitated the production process at every step. David Brown, Stephanie Batkie, Taryn Hakala, Sai Samant, Brook Hefright, Lauren Squires, and Moisés Perales-Escudero made our lives infinitely easier as we went about our work, and we couldn’t have done what we did without their help and guidance.

We leave the Journal of English Linguistics in the very capable hands of Matt Gordon and Peter Grund, two scholars whose work spans many of main areas of interest for the journal and who have been invaluable contributors to the journal as authors and reviewers for many years. We have every confidence that they will continue moving the journal forward, and we are excited to help them in that work. We also wish them the same mix of exhilaration, gratitude, and intellectual engagement that we have enjoyed during our time as editors.