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Celebrating the Lsa Centennial in Language: Commentary on Bloomfield 1925

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Brian D. Joseph and
Sarah Grey Thomason
Brian D. Joseph*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
Sarah Grey Thomason*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
[joseph.1@osu.edu], [thomason@umich.edu]
[joseph.1@osu.edu], [thomason@umich.edu]
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Extract

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’. 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.

Information

Type
Commentary
Information
Language , Volume 100 , Issue 1 , March 2024, pp. 163 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 Linguistic Society of America

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