Travaux de Linguistique

About Travaux de Linguistique

Travaux de Linguistique — Journal Profile

Travaux de Linguistique (fuller title in recent listings: Travaux de Linguistique: Revue Internationale de Linguistique Française) is a French-language, peer-reviewed journal of linguistics whose privileged field is the French language approached through research in general linguistics. Published in Belgium by De Boeck Supérieur (earlier imprints in its history include Duculot, of Paris and Gembloux), the journal has for decades served specialists, teachers and an educated readership with research articles, documentation, critical discussion and scholarly communication in one venue. It practises double-anonymous review, with both readers drawn from specialists in the subject of each submission, and it is published with financial support from the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) and the Fondation universitaire, according to its own scope statement carried by indexing services. This profile is anchored on the Journals World record for the journal (print ISSN 0082-6049) and on the journal's published scope statement, publisher listings, Cairn platform records, Scopus/SCImago-derived listings and OpenAlex, with each figure attributed to its source where it is used.

At a Glance

What the Journal Is

Travaux de Linguistique is one of the established Francophone venues for the scientific study of the French language. Its own scope statement, preserved in indexing records, defines it precisely: it is an international scientific journal whose privileged field of study is the French language approached through research in general linguistics. That pairing — French as the object, general linguistics as the method — is the journal's identity. It is not a journal of French literature, not a journal of language teaching as such, and not a general linguistics journal that happens to be in French; it is the place where questions of linguistic theory are worked out on French evidence, and where the description of French is held to the standards of contemporary linguistic science.

The same statement gives the journal a fourfold ambition: research, documentation, criticism and communication. It is addressed at once to specialists, to teachers and to a cultivated public. That triple audience explains the journal's tone and format across its history: research articles that advance analysis, documentary and survey material that records the state of knowledge about French, critical discussion including memorial and assessment essays on major figures — its 2003 volume carried Béatrice Lamiroy's memorial to Maurice Gross, the founder of lexicon-grammar, whose own work had appeared in the journal — and a communicative role linking the Francophone linguistics community across Belgium, France and beyond. The presence of a Gross memorial, and of Gross's own 1988 article on the elementary sentence in issue 17, locates the journal within the French descriptive tradition of distributional and lexicon-grammar research while remaining open to other frameworks.

History and Development

The journal's numbering tells part of its history: issue 17 appeared in 1988 and issue 46 in 2003, a rhythm consistent with a journal appearing roughly twice a year over a long run that began well before its modern indexing coverage. Its early publisher was Duculot, the Gembloux-based house long associated with French-language scholarship — the 1988 volume is cited as published at Paris and Gembloux by Duculot — before the title passed into the De Boeck group, whose university publishing in Belgium continued it as Boeck Université and then De Boeck Supérieur. Bibliographic citations of the journal in university records use the fuller form "Travaux de Linguistique: Revue Internationale de Linguistique Française", as in the citation of a 2019 article on networks and mobility in the varieties of French in Canada in issue 78.

International citation databases picked the journal up later than its founding generation: SCImago-derived listings give Scopus coverage of 2001–2022 and 2024, and the Journals World record carried the same coverage window. Authors should read that window as the databases' coverage, not as the journal's lifespan. In the digital era the journal is distributed through the Cairn platform, the major Francophone humanities and social-sciences portal built by Belgian and French publishers, where its issues are catalogued and sold to libraries; a contents listing tradition going back to the early web — Joseph Reisdoerfer's table-of-contents compilation for the journal hosted in Luxembourg academic pages — testifies to how long the journal has been a reference point for the description of French.

Scope and Subjects

The journal welcomes work on the French language within general linguistics. On the evidence of its scope statement and its published content, its recurring subject areas include the following.

• Syntax: the structure of the French sentence, predication, argument structure and the elementary sentence, in the tradition the journal itself helped to build.
• Lexicon and lexicon-grammar: the description of French vocabulary and its grammatical behaviour, frozen expressions, compound forms and the construction of lexical resources.
• Semantics and pragmatics: meaning, reference, discourse and the communicative functioning of French in use.
• Phonetics and phonology: the sound system of French and its variation.
• Morphology: word formation and inflection in French, including compound adjectives and other historically studied formations.
• Variation and sociolinguistics: the varieties of French across the Francophone world — recent issues include work on French in Canada and on networks and mobility in language variation.
• Diachrony: the history of French and the grammaticalization and change of its structures.
• Discourse and text linguistics: spoken and written French, interaction and genre.
• Documentation, criticism and scholarly communication: surveys, critical assessments, memorials and discussion pieces serving the journal's documentary and critical roles for the discipline.

The fit test is demanding in a specific way: the manuscript should be about French (or about general-linguistic questions argued substantially on French data), written in French, and framed so that both the specialist and the teacher-reader the journal addresses can take something from it. Work on other languages belongs only where French remains the centre of the analysis; purely literary studies and purely pedagogical reports sit outside the stated remit.

Publisher and Platform

De Boeck Supérieur is the academic publishing arm of the De Boeck group in Belgium, a long-standing publisher of university textbooks and journals in French for Belgium, France and the wider Francophone world. Secondary listings variously render the imprint as De Boeck Supérieur or, from an earlier period, Boeck Université. The journal's digital presence runs through Cairn.info, where Francophone journals from De Boeck and partner houses are hosted for institutional subscribers, and through the publisher's own catalogue. The journal acknowledges the financial support of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) — the research fund of the French-speaking Community of Belgium — and of the Fondation universitaire, a funding pattern typical of Belgian Francophone scholarly journals and a sign of the journal's place in that publicly supported research ecosystem.

Peer Review and Editorial Practice

The journal's review model is stated in its own scope text and can be quoted with confidence: the journal practises double-anonymous reading, and to guarantee a quality evaluation the two readers are always chosen from among the specialists of the subject in question. Authors can therefore expect two specialist reports, anonymity in both directions, and evaluation by scholars working on the same corner of French linguistics as the submission itself. Named editors, turnaround times and acceptance rates are not published in the sources consulted for this profile and are recorded as not publicly disclosed. Given the journal's audience definition, authors should write for informed non-specialists within linguistics as well as for experts: unexplained framework-internal notation and untranslated Anglophone terminology sit poorly in a journal addressed also to teachers and a cultivated readership, in French.

Metrics and Standing

Travaux de Linguistique is a small Francophone journal, and like most French-language humanities titles it cites and is cited mainly within its language community; metrics must be reported by source. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its print ISSN at the time of checking (source record S149652727), listed 518 works with 2,383 citations, an h-index of 22 and an i10-index of 61, with a two-year mean citedness of about 0.39 — the deepest OpenAlex footprint among the titles in this batch, reflecting decades of citable descriptive work on French. SCImago-derived listings consulted gave a CiteScore of 0.3, an SJR of 0.131, coverage of 2001–2022 and 2024, and quartile placements reported variously as Q3 (in Linguistics and Language, in one listing's summary) and Q4 in the Journals World record carried from its own source; the h-index in the Scopus-based listings was 8, far below the OpenAlex figure because the two databases count different corpora over different windows. None of these numbers measures the journal's actual function in Francophone linguistics, which is that of a reference venue where the description of French is archived and argued. No Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate is claimed in the sources consulted.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal is covered by Scopus for the years stated in the SCImago-derived listings (2001–2022, 2024) and is distributed digitally through Cairn, the principal discovery platform for Francophone humanities and social-science journals. OpenAlex indexes it as a journal-type source under both the print ISSN 0082-6049 and an electronic ISSN, 1782-1576, which the Journals World record does not carry — authors and librarians citing the journal's identifiers should be aware of that second number. One listing also named UGC CARE among the journal's indexations. A Directory of Open Access Journals listing could not be verified from the DOAJ search-API check made for this profile, and the journal is a subscription title through its platform, so no open-access claim is made here. For a definitive current indexing list, the publisher's catalogue entry and the Scopus source list are the authoritative checks.

Fees and Open Access

No article processing charge or submission fee is stated in the sources consulted for this profile, and Belgian Francophone journals of this type are conventionally supported by research-fund subvention — here, the acknowledged FNRS and Fondation universitaire support — and by library subscriptions through platforms such as Cairn rather than by author-side charges. The fee position is nevertheless recorded formally as not publicly disclosed: authors should confirm the current terms with the publisher before submitting, and should not assume a charge where none is published.

How to Submit

Submissions follow the publisher's and journal's current instructions, reachable through the De Boeck Supérieur catalogue and the journal's Cairn pages. In practice, an author should (1) confirm the manuscript's object is the French language treated with the methods of general linguistics; (2) write in French of a standard fit for the journal's specialist and teacher readership, with examples glossed and formatted consistently; (3) frame the contribution against the existing description of French — this journal's readers know the literature, including its own back issues, and a submission that ignores the Francophone descriptive tradition will be sent back to it by the two specialist readers; (4) keep data presentation exact, since descriptive claims about French are the journal's currency and are checked against native and corpus evidence by its reviewers; and (5) follow the publisher's formatting instructions for references and abstracts as given in the current author guidance. Authors outside the Francophone university system are welcome in principle — the journal calls itself international — but the language of publication is French and the conversation joined is the Francophone one.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Not

Travaux de Linguistique is a strong choice for linguists working on French syntax, lexicon, semantics, phonology, variation or diachrony who want their work read, in French, by the community that maintains the scientific description of French — and cited by it, as the journal's OpenAlex citation record shows its articles are. It suits Belgian, French, Canadian and wider Francophone scholarship, and work in the lexicon-grammar and descriptive traditions has a natural home here. It is a poor fit for English-language manuscripts, for general theoretical work with only token French examples, for literary studies, and for authors whose institutional evaluation requires a Journal Impact Factor or a high Anglophone quartile. Teachers and cultivated readers form part of its audience, but the journal is a research venue: classroom reports without a linguistic research contribution do not match its remit.

Reading and Using the Journal

For readers, the back run of Travaux de Linguistique functions as a cumulative record of how the scientific description of French has developed: sentence structure, lexicon, variation and discourse are all documented in its pages by the scholars who did the describing, and its critical and memorial essays mark the discipline's own history. Students of French linguistics will find its articles useful precisely because the journal insists that general-linguistic argument answer to French evidence in detail. Librarians should catalogue it under its print ISSN 0082-6049 while noting the electronic ISSN 1782-1576 that OpenAlex associates with the title, and should be aware that citations appear both under the short title and under the fuller form Revue Internationale de Linguistique Française, which can split catalogue searches if only one form is tried.

Similar Journals

• Langue Française — the French journal devoted to the linguistic study of French, a close neighbour in scope.
• Langages — a French general-linguistics journal for theory-facing work.
• La Linguistique — the journal of the Société Internationale de Linguistique Fonctionnelle, for functional approaches to language and languages.
• Lingvisticæ Investigationes — the John Benjamins journal associated with the lexicon-grammar tradition.
• Revue de Linguistique Romane — for Romance-comparative and historical work beyond French alone.
• Le Français Moderne — another long-standing venue for the study of French language.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Travaux de Linguistique's ISSN? Print ISSN 0082-6049, as carried on the Journals World record. OpenAlex also lists an electronic ISSN, 1782-1576, alongside it.

Who publishes the journal? De Boeck Supérieur in Belgium (earlier rendered Boeck Université; historically Duculot), with financial assistance from the FNRS and the Fondation universitaire acknowledged in the journal's scope statement.

What is the journal's scope? The French language approached through general linguistics, with a fourfold role of research, documentation, criticism and communication for specialists, teachers and a cultivated public, per its own statement.

How does peer review work? Double-anonymous review, with both readers always chosen from specialists of the submission's subject, per the journal's stated practice.

In what language does it publish? French.

Is the journal open access? It is a subscription journal distributed through Cairn; a DOAJ listing could not be verified at the time of writing, and no open-access status is claimed here.

Does it charge authors? No charge is stated in the sources consulted; the fee position is recorded as not publicly disclosed.

What is its h-index? Source-dependent: OpenAlex listed 22 at checking time over a long corpus, while Scopus-based listings reported 8. Quote the figure with its source and date, never alone.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was compiled from the Journals World record for the journal; the journal's own scope statement as carried by indexing services (privileged field, fourfold role, triple audience, double-anonymous review by two subject specialists, FNRS and Fondation universitaire support); publisher and platform listings (De Boeck Supérieur / Boeck Université, Belgium; Cairn distribution); bibliographic citations of the journal in university records (fuller title form; issue 78, 2019; issue 46, 2003, and issue 17, 1988, under Duculot); SCImago-derived listings (Scopus coverage 2001–2022 and 2024, CiteScore 0.3, SJR 0.131, category Linguistics and Language, quartile reports); and OpenAlex source record S149652727 resolved through the print ISSN (518 works, 2,383 citations, h-index 22, i10-index 61, and the electronic ISSN 1782-1576, at checking time). Named editors, acceptance rates, review timelines and any author charges were not stated in the consulted sources and are recorded as not publicly disclosed, in line with the no-fabrication standard applied to this profile.