Writing AVMs easily in LaTeX: The new langsci-avm package

Posted on 20. April 2020 by Felix Kopecky

Attribute-value matrices, also known as feature structures, are used by various theories to describe linguistic objects and their complex properties. Among others, they are used in HPSG and LFG, and so several of the books submitted to Language Science Press depend on a comprehensive and user-friendly way to input them to LaTeX.

An example structure created with langsci-avm. See the Section “Example 1” below for how to create this AVM.

Our users almost always use the avm package or the extended avm+, of which an unkown amount of modified versions are circulated online. The original avm package is not a bad package at all, but it has not been updated for some years, which has led to problems. For example, some of the versions assume that the old font selection commands, \it, \bf, etc. are still used, which should be avoided in modern documents. Continue reading →

Achievements 2019

Posted on 29. January 2020 by Sebastian Nordhoff

We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016, 2017, 2018). This is the fifth installment, for 2019.

Books and series

In 2019, we published 30 books:

78 works were proposed to Language Science Press in 2019, for a total of 503. In 2017, 101 works had been proposed.

Running expressions of interest 2019

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Prepublication of chapters in edited volumes

Posted on 14. November 2019 by Sebastian Nordhoff

Edited volumes and time to publication

Edited volumes are an important type of publication in linguistics, and Language Science Press has published about 50 edited volumes up to now. However, the time to publication is normally an issue for edited volumes given the larger number of contributors. In a project with 12 contributors, chances are that at least one of them will not hand in the chapter, the revision or the proofs in time, which delays the whole project.

This leads to a vicious circle: everybody knows that probably the volume will be late anyway, so authors adjust their priorities and focus on some other work where the timing is more critical. Which delays the work even more, so everybody adjusts their priorities again and so on. When I was still actively publishing as a linguist, I had a paper in a volume which took 5 years to come out!

This whole problem arises because the book and all its chapters will only be published once the last chapter is in. Otherwise, page numbers cannot be assigned and cross-references will not work.

Our solution

Our series Open Slavic Linguistics was unhappy with this state of affairs and suggested that book chapters can be published ahead of the volume, as so-called prepublications. This means that all chapters which have been reviewed, revised, proofread, and typeset can be made available on our website. The setup of our LaTeX class allows to compile the same chapter either individually or as part of a book. As for the pagination problem, we simply set the page numbers to roman and add a note to the footer that the page numbering is preliminary. That way, readers are not led to mistakenly cite Smith (2020: 12) for a chapter which will have a final pagination much higher than 12.

Footer of the prepublished version of a chapter with information about the volume the chapter will appear in and a note on pagination

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Two new series on multilingualism

Posted on 26. March 2019 by Sebastian Nordhoff

Linguists have always known about the importance of contact between different ethnic and cultural groups. These encounters have shaped our societies, our cultures, and thereby also our language. With two new series on multilingualism, we provide new scientific outlets which can inform current debates in society at large and contribute scientific facts and models to the discussions. These two series complement each other nicely:

Current Issues in Bilingualism – edited by Andrea C. Schalley (Karlstad), M Carmen Parafita Couto (Leiden), Susana A. Eisenchlas (Griffith), Galina Putjata (Münster), and Jorge Valdés Kroff (Florida) – publishes both theoretical and empirical studies on individual and societal bilingualism, and hence bridges the gap that has traditionally been reflected in different approaches to the field. It covers both linguistic and cognitive as well as educational, affective, and social aspects of speakers’ bilinguality.

Contact and Multilingualism – edited by Isabelle Léglise & Stefano Manfredi (both CNRS SeDyL) – on the other hand looks at multilingual practices and language contact both at individual and societal levels together with historical, socio-anthropological and typological issues.

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Achievements 2018

Posted on 30. January 2019 by Sebastian Nordhoff

We started our annual retrospectives in 2015 (2016, 2017). This is the fourth installment, for 2018.

Books and series

In 2018, we published 33 books:

101 works were proposed to Language Science Press in 2018, for a total of 425. In 2017, 99 works had been proposed.

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An interview with Berkeley’s Larry Hyman, author of seven chapters in five LangSci books

Posted on 28. November 2018 by Sebastian Nordhoff

Larry, you have authored altogether 7 chapters in 5 LangSci books in 4 different series (see list below). That sounds very versatile! Can you give us some background on those chapters and what ties them together?

Yes, I guess you could say that my interests are wide-ranging, which I enumerate on the Berkeley Linguistics website as phonological theory, language typology, and African languages, especially Bantu and Niger-Congo. I think what ties them together is that I am always thinking about typology, about how languages are the same vs. different. I’m fascinated with the variation among related languages which respond differently to the same conflicting concerns, often involving interfaces between phonology and grammar. This is the case in my article in the Enfield collection, where I contrasted intra-phonological dependencies with the possibility that there could be non-accidental dependences between phonology, morphology, and syntax. The other six chapters derive from my deep involvement with individual and comparative African linguistics, where I go after whatever strikes me as interesting and important.

Given my extensive work on tone systems, it is perhaps surprising that none of the LangSci publications have to do with tone. In more than one occasion I have set out to work on a new tone system (there’s nothing more exciting than studying a language from scratch!), but I quickly am distracted by something unusual and hence intriguing in the grammar. This is the case, for example, in the joint article on Lusoga multiple exponence. The three comparative chapters in the Watters volume as well as the multiple argument chapter in Bisang & Malchukov synthesize my personal field work on several dozen Bantoid, especially Grassfields Bantu languages, in Cameroon, where I could not help becoming involved in reconstructing proto systems as well as the historical developments our Grassfields Bantu Working Group documented language to language, dialect to dialect.

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Our Community Proofreading setup evaluated by Library Science

Posted on 12. September 2018 by Sebastian Nordhoff

The Berlin School of Library and Information Science has had a theoretical look at the way proofreading is organised at Language Science Press, resulting in a BA thesis by Lole Westedt entitled

Community Proofreading am Beispiel Language Science Press: „Gratis-Korrekturlesen“ oder auch inhaltlich anreichernd?
[Community proofreading as used by Language Science Press: Only cost-free copy-editing, or also additional improvement of content?]

This study evaluates in how far the way we integrate the community in the proofreading of our books via PaperHive can be seen as a type of (content) open review, and what types of community comments we find (typos, wording, specialist suggestions). We have described our approach to community proofreading in a couple of blog posts:

This thesis by Lole Westedt puts our efforts in a broader context and finds that, actually, what we call “Community Proofreading” meets 6 out of 7 criteria of Ross-Hellauer‘s list of Open Review dimensions:

Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other’s identity
Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article.
Open participation: The wider community are able to contribute to the review process.
Open interaction: Direct reciprocal discussion between author(s) and reviewers, and/or between reviewers, is allowed and encouraged.
Open pre-review manuscripts: Manuscripts are made immediately available (e.g., via preprint servers like arXiv) in advance of any formal peer review procedures.
Open final-version commenting: Review or commenting on final “version of record” publications.
Open platforms: Review is de-coupled from publishing in that it is facilitated by a different organizational entity than the venue of publication.

Westedt then had a look at a sample of 10 books, from which she selected 1 chapter each and analysed the comments she found.

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What it means to be open and community-based: The Unicode cookbook as a showcase

Posted on 11. July 2018 by Sebastian Nordhoff

We are happy to announce the publication of The Unicode Cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles by Steven Moran and Michael Cysouw. Next to being a very insightful and valuable book for all linguists dealing with character encoding issues (most if not all linguists?), this publication also points the way forward in a number of domains central for the future of academic publishing in linguistics. This blog post discusses the different innovative aspects we see manifest in this book.

Multiple authors

The book has not one, but two authors. Both have contributed their respective perspectives and expertises. While we see multiple editors for edited volumes on a regular basis, multiple authors for a monograph are much less common. This has certainly to do with the fact that a monograph is much less amenable to “chunking” than an edited volume. In order to make sure that the authors do not interfere with each other’s work, a clear separation of tasks is necessary, as is version control.

Version control

The LaTeX source code of the project is available on GitHub at https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook. The authors started on 2015-03-29 with this version. All historical files are still available.
Until today, 310 updates have been made to the book, of which 174 by Moran and 121 by Cysouw. The full history of the project can be seen at https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook/commits/master. In order to have clearly designated versions for reference, the authors have created releases. Continue reading →

100/100. Funding campaign successful, we will move on!

Posted on 17. May 2018 by Sebastian Nordhoff

In 2017 we announced our plans for funding the operations of Language Science Press in the future. Rather than charging readers for reading or authors for publishing, we wanted to set up Language Science Press as a true community enterprise, where research institutions worldwide collaborate to set up an Open Access publication platform.

Many linguists worldwide contacted their librarians and asked them for support, and many of the libraries they asked were happy to fund our platform via Knowledge Unlatched. We are thus proud that we can announce today that we have reached our pledging target of 100 institutions worldwide which support us with 1000 EUR a year each, for the next three years!

This means that the operations for the next three years — and the next 90 books — are secured. However, we are at the lower bound of the intended corridor of 100,000-115,000 EUR. Technically, there was also an additional pledging program for individuals for raising another 15,000 EUR. We abandoned this, as we felt that the financial burden of book publication should not be borne by individuals, but rather by research institutions. As a consequence, we will keep the institutional pledging open until we reach 115 supporters. At 100 supporting institutions, we can publish books, but we cannot provide any extras such as nice maps or extensive help with conversion. When we reach 115, we will be able to provide more extensive support for authors or subfields which require it. So, if your library is still considering whether to join or not, now is the time! You can point to this impressive list of institutions worldwide which already fund Language Science Press. THANK YOU!