Focus and Scope
The main content of Semantics & Pragmatics are high quality, original, self-contained research articles on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. While the core of our target audience is academic linguists, we expect to also publish material by, or of relevance to, philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists.
Papers must include new results of interest to those working in semantics and pragmatics, and must demonstrate clear significance for theoretical development of those areas. Provided the work meets those criteria, we will welcome both submissions of papers on core topics in semantics and pragmatics, and submissions of interdisciplinary papers involving work on syntax, phonology, psycho-linguistics, text and corpus studies, discourse and conversation analysis, computational semantics, the lexicon, historical linguistics, cross-linguistic typology, logic, and philosophy of language.
We have an ambitious goal: to publish as many as possible of the top 100 articles in semantics and pragmatics in a given year, and no other full articles.
Section Policies
Main Articles
Editors- David Beaver, University of Texas Austin
- Kai von Fintel, MIT
 Open Submissions |
Indexed |
Peer Reviewed |
Squibs, Remarks, and Replies
Editors- David Beaver, University of Texas Austin
- Kai von Fintel, MIT
| Open Submissions |
Indexed |
Peer Reviewed |
Editorials
Editorials, published on occasion.
Editors- David Beaver, University of Texas Austin
- Kai von Fintel, MIT
 Open Submissions |
Indexed |
Peer Reviewed |
Peer Review Process
We anticipate submission and rejection rates comparable with the other top journals in our field. The editors will act as a first stage filter on papers, normally within a week of receipt. If a paper is determined to be of potential relevance, it will be sent to at least two reviewers drawn from our Editorial Board. The Editorial Board consists primarily of PhD holding academics active in the subfields of semantics and pragmatics, selected by the editors, and subject to advice from the Advisory Board. The Board will be of sufficient size that we will not normally call on the same reviewer more than twice in a year. The review board is public, but we will not reveal the identity of the reviewer of a particular paper except at the direct request of the reviewer.
We do not require that submitted papers be anonymous, since this is frequently an unattainable goal. However, the author of a paper has the right to remain anonymous to the reviewers throughout the review process. In that case, the author should take care to anonymize the paper, and should include in a clearly visible position on the front page the text ``Submitted to Semantics & Pragmatics for anonymous review." The reviewers are then considered under obligation not to attempt to discern the identity of the author.
Following initial review, the editors will accept, reject, or call for revision. In case there is a need for revision, the editor may opt to request extended commentary from one or both reviewers in order to clarify what revisions are needed, and will then forward a request for revision to the author. Following revision, the editor may decide to publish, although following major revisions a paper will normally be sent for at least one further review. After acceptance, editorial assistants will take charge of proof-reading and formatting.
The editors will have based the review time on what they perceive to be the length and technical complexity of the paper, but will work on the assumption that writing a short review for a paper should normally require a half-day of work. Given that we aim to ask for at most two reviews per year from each reviewer, someone who accepts a position on our review board is making a commitment to approximately 1 day of work per year, or slightly more if we happen to ask for extended commentary, or a review of a particularly long or technically complex paper. This is by no means a trivial commitment, and we ask review board members to notify us immediately if it is beyond what they can offer. One of the most important goals of the journal is to keep time from submission to publication to a minimum. With the advantages of the open access format, and the strong commitment of our editorial board to this goal, we aim for a significantly faster time-to-publication than is currently common in linguistics.
Publication Frequency
The journal will start off by publishing one volume a year. There will not be separate issues bundling a subset of the articles in a volume. Instead, each article, so to speak, constitutes its own issue: the articles are numbered sequentially in the order they get published. For page numbering, we have adopted the scheme introduced by the ACM recently (Boisvert et al. 2007). The page numbering for each article will start at 1. The page numbers in the article will indicate both the article number and the page number. So, the 17th page of the 3rd article in the first volume will have the page number 3:17.
Archiving
Publisher perpetually authorizes participants in the LOCKSS system to archive and restore Semantics & Pragmatics through the LOCKSS System.
ISSN: 1937-8912 | Journal doi: 10.3765/sp