EL Publishing annual activity report, August 2020

The past year has been a very busy one for EL Publishing. We have published two volumes of Language Documentation and Description:

1. volume 17 (LDD 17) edited by Peter K. Austin was published on 28th July 2020. It contains three general research papers, one Language Contexts paper, and 12 Language Snapshot papers. Further details of the contents can be found in this blog post;

2. volume 18 (LDD 18) edited by Candide Simard, Sarah M. Dopierala and E. Marie Thaut was published on 23rd August 2020. It contains seven research papers on the phonology, morphology and syntax of the Sylheti language, spoken in Bangladesh, India and diaspora communities in the UK, USA and elsewhere. Further details of the contents can be found in this blog post.

One particularly appealing aspect of the two volumes published this year is the large number of papers by early career researchers, ranging from MA students to post-doctoral researchers, from a wide range of countries. All their submissions were double-blind peer reviewed according to our usual processes, and accepted papers met our expected international standards. It is pleasing to be able to support such good work by early career researchers, for some of whom this was their first ever academic publication.

Over the past year, Language Documentation and Description received 30 submissions, of which 18 were accepted for publication, 5 are awaiting revision and re-submission, 4 are currently under review, and 3 were rejected after review. We are grateful to the following colleagues for their support in reviewing submissions this year (some of them more than once): Laura Arnold, Elena Bashir, Pierpaolo De Carlo, Sebastian Drude, Carola Emkow, Daniel Everett, Kristina Gallego, Jeff Good, Lyn Hou, Marcus Jaeger, Angelika Jakobi, Daniel Kaufman, Yukinori Kimoto, Armik Mirzayan, Stephen Morey, Pamela Munro, Karthick Narayan, Rachel Nordlinger, Sheena Shah, Jane Simpson, Tonya Stebbins, Riitta Valijarvi, Mark Van de Velde, Anthony Webster, Anthony Woodbury, and Louward Zubiri. We also thank Ellen Foote for help with sub-editing one paper in LDD 18. Tom Castle provided magnificent support with design and layout for both volumes, and David Nathan wove his usual magic with cataloguing, and web site development and maintenance. General editorial advice throughout the year, for which we are extremely grateful, was provided by Gerrit Dimmendaal, Jeff Good, Lenore Grenoble, and Anthony Woodbury.

It looks like the coming year will be equally busy and interesting for EL Publishing. In addition to receiving and reviewing submissions for LDD 19, we are working on a further volume which will be a special issue on The social lives of linguistic legacy materials edited by Lise Dobrin and Saul Schwartz.