Celebrating the LSA centennial in Language : Commentary on Bloomfield 1925

Celebrating the LSA centennial in Language:Commentary on Bloomfield 1925 Brian D. Joseph and Sarah Grey Thomason The year 2024 marks the Linguistic Society of America's centennial, dating from the founding of the Society at its first meeting, 28 December 1924, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Work on the LSA's journal, Language, began in 1924 as well, since a Committee on Publications was constituted at that meeting, with the express purpose, as reported in the Proceedings of that meeting, of overseeing 'a regular independent publication, either quarterly or annually'.1 Thus, although the first issue of the journal appeared in March of 1925, it is appropriate to also celebrate the journal's centennial in 2024. Accordingly, the LSA's Centennial Planning Committee decided to do something special with the journal's 100th and 101st volumes: those eight issues of Language will include, in addition to the usual mix of original articles and book reviews, important articles from the past, one (or two, in some instances) from each decade since 1924—the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and so on, excluding the current still-emerging decade. Each reprinted article will be accompanied by a commentary that situates the paper in its own time and place and assesses its significance then and (in many cases) now. To fit all of the decades into eight issues of the journal, a few issues will have more than one reprinted article. Moreover, the first decade has more than one entry: the present issue, 100(1), contains, in addition to a reprinted research article from the 1920s (Boas 1929), Leonard Bloomfield's 1925 article 'Why a linguistic society?', which appeared in Language 1(1).1–5. This article, the journal's very first, is included because of its status as the Society's foundational publication.2 The articles to be reprinted were selected by a committee consisting of the current editors of Language, John Beavers and Shelome Gooden; the immediate past editor, Andries Coetzee; and two former editors, Brian D. Joseph and Sarah G. Thomason. The selection process began with the three-volume online publication The best of Language, 1925–2016,3 for which the reprinted papers were selected and edited by a team of past Language editors: Gregory Carlson, Joseph, and Thomason. The selection process for that anthology was extensive, involving data on the most-cited Language articles, a survey that asked LSA members to name their favorite Language articles, inspection of End Page 163 other anthologies of linguistics articles, and—ultimately—the anthology editors' judgment. For the current project we (re)read the articles in the 2016–2019 anthology and also checked past issues of Language to see if perhaps some articles that did not make the anthology might be appropriate for the Centennial reprinting. Our main selection criteria for the one article of each decade were quality (of course!) and importance to the field of linguistics—that is, importance for the history of our discipline and/or for current debates within the field. As the reprinted articles are revealed on an issue-by-issue basis over the next two years, readers will notice a distinct lack of authorial diversity. This situation in turn reflects the overwhelming predominance of white male authors in the pages of Language, especially in the Society's early decades, and indeed in the Society in general. The relative invisibility of women members in the early years is discussed in Falk 1994. The first female author was Sarah T. Barrows, who published a review of Helen M. Peppard's book The correction of speech defects in issue 2(4) (Barrows 1926), and the first female author of a Language article was Louise Pound, who published 'The etymology of an English expletive' in issue 3(2) (Pound 1927). In terms of other demographics, it is worth noting that two Hispanic authors (both males) appear multiple times in Language in the 1920s; see de Angulo 1925, 1926a,b,c, 1929 and Espinosa 1925, 1927a,b,c,d, 1928a,b,c. To turn to the first reprinted article, Bloomfield's 1925 foundational piece, reading it is like stepping back in time, as it evokes an era in...