Thank you for your willingness to write a book review for the LINGUIST List. This document covers the mechanics of writing and submitting your review. Beyond the information provided here, we urge reviewers (especially less experienced reviewers) to look at recent LINGUIST book reviews for models of how to approach reviewing in particular subfields, particular types of books (e.g., monographs versus edited volumes or conference proceedings), and so on.
Once your review has been submitted, we will edit and post it if there are no substantial questions or changes. If we have questions or need to ask for revisions, we will send you an edited version and ask that you return revisions within two weeks.
Note that LINGUIST List only publishes reviews that have been solicited through the reviews system. Unsolicited reviews will not be accepted.
Your review should consist of the following parts in this order (but without numbers). The Google doc you receive will already contain the appropriate headings.
For example, if you are reviewing a textbook, indicate what audience it is intended for, and briefly what it covers. If it is a monograph, summarize its main points without going into technical detail. If it is an edited collection of papers by different authors, state what each paper is about, and how they fit together.
Please insert the header SUMMARY above this section.
A high-quality review will normally include pointing out some of the book's merits and shortcomings, identifying problems, asking questions, and presenting positive or negative implications of the analyses. LINGUIST reviews are often the first evaluations of a book available to the linguistics community, and unlike paper journals, LINGUIST encourages authors and readers to reply and offers them the immediate opportunity to do so. In keeping with standard LINGUIST policy, reviewers must keep the tone of reviews scholarly, and avoid attacking persons and institutions. This does not mean that the reviewer should avoid controversy or criticism, only that the tone of that criticism must be professional and scientific. Reviews that do not meet LINGUIST standards for scholarly discourse will be returned to the author for revision.
When you write your evaluation section, consider the following questions:
Please insert the header EVALUATION at the beginning of this section.
A complete list of references to works that you have cited in the body of the review. Where you cite references, give the authors' names and dates of publication, and page numbers if relevant, as in the following example.
“It is particularly fitting, however, for the minimalist project as laid out in considerable detail in Chomsky (1995) and much subsequent work by Chomsky (such as Chomsky 2001) as well as many other scholars (see e.g. Epstein & Hornstein 1999b, Baltin & Collins 2001, Hendrick 2003 for collections of recent appraisals).”
Put the complete references of citations at the end of the review, as in the following examples. You may use any common reference style, though we encourage use of the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics.
REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of language. New York: Praeger.
Coetsem, Frans van. 2000. A general and unified theory of the transmission process in language contact. Heidelberg: Winter.
Franks, Steven. 2005. Bulgarian clitics are positioned in the syntax. http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/people/homepages/franks/Bg_clitics_remark_dense.pdf(17 May, 2006.)
Iverson, Gregory K. 1983. Korean /s/. Journal of Phonetics 11. 191-200.
Lahiri, Aditi (ed.). 2000. Analogy, leveling, markedness: Principles of change in phonology and morphology (Trends in Linguistics 127). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Murray, Robert W. & Theo Vennemann. 1983. Sound change and syllable structure in Germanic phonology. Language 59(3). 514-528.
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. 1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Write a short paragraph (approximately 100 words) about yourself, describing your research interests, career goals, etc. Take a look at recently posted reviews for examples. This description will be requested in the online form
when you submit the review.