The Linguistic Review

About The Linguistic Review

The Linguistic Review: Generative Grammar's Discussion Journal Since 1981

The Linguistic Review is an international peer-reviewed journal of theoretical linguistics, published by De Gruyter Mouton (Walter de Gruyter) and in publication since 1 January 1981. Its identity within linguistics is precise: it publishes high-quality work in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics within the framework of generative grammar and related disciplines, together with critical discussion of theoretical linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology. Where a general linguistics journal spreads itself across every subfield and method, this journal concentrates on the formal, generative tradition — the study of the mental grammar that speakers carry — and it has done so for more than four decades, making it one of the enduring specialist venues of that tradition.

The journal also defines itself as a platform for discussion. It does not accept brief book reviews; instead it welcomes substantial review articles of important new monographs that represent new trends in the field, and it publishes dissertation abstracts and letters to the editor alongside research articles. Thematic and special issues, prepared with guest editors and held to the same peer review standard as regular submissions, are a regular feature — recent examples address case, agreement and ellipsis; workspace, labelling and related questions in syntactic theory; empirical approaches to elliptical constructions; phonological solutions to morphological problems; and Japanese syntax in a minimalist perspective. For a theoretical linguist, the journal is therefore both an archive of record and a debating chamber.

Quick Facts

Scope in Depth

The publisher's statement of the journal's objective names five core areas — phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics — inside a generative framework, and each area has a distinct flavour in the journal's pages.

Syntax is historically the centre of gravity. The journal publishes work on sentence structure in the generative tradition: movement, agreement, case, ellipsis, clause structure, and the architecture of the grammar itself, including minimalist theorising about how derivations are built and labelled. The special issues on labelling, on ellipsis, and on Japanese syntax in a minimalist perspective show the range from abstract theory to detailed language-particular analysis held to theoretical standards.

Phonology and morphology form the second pillar. Sound structure, prosody and the interface between phonology and morphology recur throughout the archive, including a special issue devoted to phonological solutions to morphological problems and earlier thematic work on prosody and prosodic interfaces in Japanese and Korean. The editor-in-chief's own field is phonology, and the journal is a recognised home for formal phonological argumentation.

Semantics and pragmatics complete the core, treated as components of the grammar and its use within a cognitive framework rather than as purely philosophical inquiry. Work connecting formal semantics to syntactic structure, and pragmatic phenomena that bear on grammatical theory, fit the journal's remit.

Critical and connective work surrounds the core: critical discussions of theoretical linguistics as cognitive psychology, review articles that assess a major monograph's claims at article length, dissertation abstracts that surface new doctoral work, and letters that continue arguments between issues. Related disciplines — cognitive science and cognitive psychology as they bear on language — appear in the journal's topic list, but always in service of the theory of grammar, not as general cognitive science.

What does not fit is equally clear. Descriptive documentation without theoretical claims, applied linguistics and language teaching research, sociolinguistic variation studies without a formal grammatical component, and computational work unconnected to grammatical theory belong in other venues. The Journals World catalogue record for this title previously associated it with a long list of adjacent topics such as language disorders and bilingualism research; the publisher's own scope is narrower and more formal than that list suggests, and authors should trust the publisher's statement.

Editorial Leadership and Community

The editor-in-chief is Harry van der Hulst of the University of Connecticut, a phonologist who has led the journal for many years and whose editorial prefaces have periodically set out the journal's direction, including its use of thematic issues to stage critiques of currently debated theories. The associate editor is Bridget Samuels of the University of Southern California. Around them sits a board of consulting editors drawn from the international generative community — scholars based in Amsterdam, Graz, France, Leuven, the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Vienna, Prague, Barcelona and elsewhere — whose names map closely onto the journal's subject areas in syntax, phonology, morphology and semantics. For authors, that board is a practical signal: a submission will be judged by specialists in the generative tradition, and it should be written for them, engaging the literature they work with and stating its theoretical claim early and precisely.

Peer Review, Submission and Production

Submissions are made online through the journal's Manuscript Central site, which guides authors through the review and publishing process. The publisher describes a double-blind procedure in which submissions go to at least two reviewers and which usually takes about four months. Manuscripts must be in English, and authors whose first language is not English are asked to have the article carefully checked by a native speaker before submission. Accepted work is published ahead of print for fast access, authors receive PDF proofs for correction against a publication schedule, and on publication they receive electronic offprints. The final version must follow the De Gruyter Mouton journal style sheet, with special characters clearly identified, and permissions letters are required for reproduced illustrations, tables or lengthy quoted passages. The editor-in-chief reserves the right to reject articles that do not conform to the requirements, so format compliance is not cosmetic.

Special issues follow the same road: the publisher states that thematic issues are subject to a rigorous process ensuring the same quality standards and peer review as regular manuscripts, with guest editors leading individual themes. A scholar hoping to propose a thematic issue should therefore expect full external review of every contribution, and should approach the editor with a theme that stages a genuine debate or consolidates an emerging research front, as the recent issues listed on the journal page do.

Open Access and Charges

The journal's access arrangements have two layers, and authors should read the current journal page before submitting because the publisher updates them. The standing model described by the publisher includes a hybrid open access option: an accepted article can be published open access on payment of a standard article processing charge of 2,000 Euro plus VAT where applicable, with authors at institutions holding a transformative agreement with the publisher able to publish open access without paying the fee themselves. Alongside that, the publisher announces that the current volume is open access via Subscribe to Open: accepted articles in that volume appear under a Creative Commons licence at no cost to authors, and from 2026 the journal transfers to open access on a year-by-year basis under that model. The practical consequence is that charges depend on the volume year and on the author's institution, so the only safe figure is the one on the live journal page at submission time; this profile reports the arrangements as the publisher states them and does not promise a fee outcome. Articles are archived by the publisher and through the independent Portico service, and the publisher's repository policy permits authors to distribute a limited number of PDF copies of the published article to colleagues as an author's copy.

Indexing and Metrics — With Their Sources

The publisher lists extensive abstracting and indexing coverage for the journal, including Scopus, the Web of Science collections (Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Current Contents in both Arts and Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences), Journal Citation Reports, MLA International Bibliography, Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics Abstracts Online, PsycINFO, ERIH PLUS, EBSCO and ProQuest services, Google Scholar and WorldCat, among many others. That breadth reflects the journal's age and standing: few theoretical linguistics titles are carried by so many services.

The publisher's own metrics table gives the recent figures with their years and sources, and this profile reproduces them on that basis: Journal Impact Factor 0.9 for 2024 (Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate, 2025), five-year Journal Impact Factor 0.8 for 2024, Journal Citation Indicator 0.77 for 2024, CiteScore 1.6 for 2024 (Scopus), SCImago Journal Rank 0.602 for 2024, and Source Normalized Impact per Paper 1.212 for 2024. SCImago's separate summary classifies the journal in Linguistics and Language in quartile Q1 and reports an h-index of 46 with coverage from 1981 onward in Scopus with an early gap. The Journals World record previously showed an h-index of 94 for this title; that figure does not match the SCImago value of 46 and should be treated as superseded. As with any humanities-leaning field, these numbers move slowly and should be read as signs of durable presence rather than as a league table: a journal founded in 1981, still publishing four issues a year of specialist theory, has a standing that a single year's factor cannot capture.

Who Should Publish Here — and How to Judge Fit

The ideal submission is a theoretically explicit study in syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics or pragmatics that advances or challenges generative thinking: a new analysis that changes what the theory predicts, data from a less-studied language that discriminate between competing analyses, or a critical reassessment of a debated proposal. Doctoral candidates should note the dissertation abstract format as a visibility route early in a career. Review articles suit established scholars ready to evaluate a major monograph's programme at length. Fit can be tested quickly: if the manuscript's bibliography is dominated by work in the generative tradition and its conclusion is a claim about grammatical structure or the architecture of the language faculty, the journal is plausibly in scope; if removing the theory leaves the paper unchanged, it is not. Authors should also weigh the four-month review expectation and the ahead-of-print route when planning around job, grant or tenure deadlines.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of The Linguistic Review? Print ISSN 0167-6318 and online ISSN 1613-3676, as shown on the publisher's journal page.

Who publishes The Linguistic Review? De Gruyter Mouton, the linguistics programme of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin. The journal was previously published by Freund Publishing House Ltd.

When was the journal founded? It was first published on 1 January 1981 and has published continuously since, currently at four issues per year.

Who edits the journal? The editor-in-chief is Harry van der Hulst (University of Connecticut); the associate editor is Bridget Samuels (University of Southern California), supported by an international board of consulting editors.

How does peer review work? Double-blind review with at least two reviewers per submission, usually taking about four months according to the publisher. Manuscripts are submitted through Manuscript Central.

What is the journal's impact factor? The publisher reports a 2024 Journal Impact Factor of 0.9 (Clarivate, 2025), a 2024 CiteScore of 1.6 (Scopus) and a 2024 SCImago Journal Rank of 0.602. Check the journal page for the newest release.

Is The Linguistic Review open access? The current volume is open access via Subscribe to Open at no cost to authors, per the publisher, and a hybrid open access option with a stated charge exists in the publisher's general terms. Confirm the arrangement for your submission year on the journal page.

Does the journal publish book reviews? Not brief ones. It welcomes substantial review articles of important new monographs, plus dissertation abstracts and letters to the editor.

The Archive as a Record of the Field

Four decades of continuous publication give the journal an archival value beyond any single article. Because it has stayed inside one research tradition while that tradition changed around it — from the government-and-binding era through the minimalist programme and its successors — its backfile reads as a history of generative grammar's internal debates: which phenomena forced theoretical change, which proposals were absorbed, and which were argued into retirement in its discussion formats. The publisher notes that from 2026 all De Gruyter journal subscriptions include access to the complete archive from volume 1, issue 1 onward, which makes that whole run reachable through a single subscription. For a graduate student entering the field, working backwards through the journal's thematic issues is an efficient education: the special issues were designed as interventions in live debates, so their tables of contents mark the questions the field considered decisive at each moment, from prosodic interfaces and roots in context to labelling, ellipsis and case. Citation practice in the field reflects this role; papers in the journal are routinely cited not only for their data but for the theoretical positions they stake out, and a well-placed article here can define the terms in which a phenomenon is discussed for years.

Preparing a Competitive Submission

Experience with journals of this type suggests several habits that raise a manuscript's chances, all consistent with the publisher's stated process. State the theoretical claim in the first two pages: reviewers reading double-blind for a theory journal decide early whether a paper has a claim worth the journal's pages, and descriptive thoroughness cannot substitute for one. Engage the immediately competing analyses by name and show where your data discriminate between them; a paper that only argues against a simplified version of a rival will not survive specialist review. Keep the empirical base and the theory in proportion — the journal publishes language-particular studies, but the particular facts must be made to bear on a general question about grammar. Respect the production rules from the start: English manuscript, the publisher's style sheet for the final version, special characters identified clearly, and permissions secured for any reproduced material. Finally, use the journal's own formats intelligently: a scholar with a strong reaction to a recent monograph may reach the field faster with a review article than with a full research paper, and a finishing doctoral student can register their dissertation's existence through the abstract format while the derived articles are in preparation. None of this guarantees acceptance at a selective specialist journal, but each point removes a reason for rejection that has nothing to do with the quality of the underlying idea.

A Note for Librarians and Evaluators

Cataloguers should record the title exactly as The Linguistic Review, with print ISSN 0167-6318 and electronic ISSN 1613-3676, publisher De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, quarterly, English, from 1981. Evaluators comparing the journal with newer theoretical titles should weigh the length of that run and the stability of its editorial identity: the same editor-in-chief, the same publisher programme and the same four-issue rhythm over many years indicate a settled journal rather than a project title, and its presence across the humanities and social-science indexes listed by the publisher confirms that libraries and abstracting services treat it as a standard holding in linguistics.

Sources and Verification

This profile rests on the publisher's official journal page at De Gruyter Brill (objective, topics, article formats, editorial board, submission and review procedure, open access terms, indexing list, journal information and the metrics table with years and sources), the journal's entry as summarised by SCImago from Scopus data (category, quartile, h-index and coverage), and the journal's bibliographic record (founding year, frequency, ISSNs and editor). All metrics are stated with the year and source the publisher or SCImago assigns to them; where the older Journals World catalogue text conflicted with those sources, the official sources were followed and the conflict is noted in the text.