The year 2024 marks the Linguistic Society of America's centennial, dating from the founding of the Society at its first meeting, 28 December 1924, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Work on the LSA's journal, Language, began in 1924 as well, since a Committee on Publications was constituted at that meeting, with the express purpose, as reported in the Proceedings of that meeting, of overseeing ‘a regular independent publication, either quarterly or annually’. Thus, although the first issue of the journal appeared in March of 1925, it is appropriate to also celebrate the journal's centennial in 2024. Accordingly, the LSA's Centennial Planning Committee decided to do something special with the journal's 100th and 101st volumes: those eight issues of Language will include, in addition to the usual mix of original articles and book reviews, important articles from the past, one (or two, in some instances) from each decade since 1924—the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and so on, excluding the current still-emerging decade. Each reprinted article will be accompanied by a commentary that situates the paper in its own time and place and assesses its significance then and (in many cases) now. To fit all of the decades into eight issues of the journal, a few issues will have more than one reprinted article. Moreover, the first decade has more than one entry: the present issue, 100(1), contains, in addition to a reprinted research article from the 1920s (Boas 1929), Leonard Bloomfield's 1925 article ‘Why a linguistic society?‘, which appeared in Language 1(1).1–5. This article, the journal's very first, is included because of its status as the Society's foundational publication.

The article being reprinted in this issue, Swadesh 1934a (initially a paper presented at the December 1933 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America), is generally considered one of the foundational works in the development of the American theory of the phoneme. Joos (1957:37) describes its significance thus:

At this time the only Americans who had a fair chance to learn linguistic method were apprentices under one of the few leaders in anthropological linguistics: there were no textbooks. The appearance of this paper by one of [Edward] Sapir's most noted pupils therefore meant a very great advance in public knowledge of its subject.

The author points out cases in which contiguous languages, though different in structure and vocabulary, exhibit in common striking morphologic peculiarities that must have spread by borrowing from language to language. A simple genealogical classification cannot therefore adequately represent the development, but ‘hybridization’ must also be taken into account.

We report an experiment eliciting ordering preferences for BINOMIAL EXPRESSIONS (e.g. bread and butter vs. butter and bread) in order to investigate the respective influences of productive and item-specific knowledge in language processing. Binomial ordering preferences reflect both (i) productive constraints involving phonological, semantic, and lexical properties, and (ii) item-specific relative frequencies. Bayesian and exemplar-based computational models of acquisition and use predict influences of both productive and item-specific knowledge on ordering preferences, with item-specific knowledge playing a smaller role the lower the expression's overall frequency. Our results confirm this prediction, but also reveal a role of item-specific knowledge even for binomials with overall frequency less than one in ten million. These findings bring a quantitative perspective to the debate over the roles of productive and item-specific knowledge in language.

This study investigated accent bias against job applicants with extralocal (non-Canadian) English accents in the Greater Toronto Area. Verbal guises recorded by British, Chinese, German, Indian, Jamaican, and Nigerian women and by Canadian women with at least one parent from these countries were evaluated by forty-eight human resources students, who rated the content of job interview responses and the candidates' ‘expression’ and ‘employability’, determined what job they should be interviewed for, and provided commentary. Canadian voices were especially privileged in comments on speech. Quantitative analysis of responses reflected bias against extralocal voices. Consequently, we provide recommendations for relevant stakeholders.

In this article, we report on findings from an ongoing study of graduate students in linguistics regarding the approaches they take to develop as professional educators and how faculty and programs in linguistics can better support graduate student teaching professionalization. In focus groups with current linguistics graduate students, we identified three key themes: formal institutional training, mentor relationships (i.e. instructor and TA relationships), and peer relationships. Mentor relationships provide students with a range of experiences and degrees of support across faculty, which influences how they develop as educators. Peer socialization is also a critical component of growth and well-being, providing graduate student teachers with both practical guidance and ongoing emotional support. We illustrate this point with a case study—a weekly teaching journal club for graduate students within our own Linguistics program, which became an important space for pedagogical development. While our results point to graduate student success and resilience through socialization, they also illustrate a common issue of professionalization in academia: students gain professional skills through noninstitutional mechanisms. Teaching professionalization largely falls to the ‘hidden curriculum’, which puts students at a disadvantage, especially those from minoritized backgrounds (Smith 2013). We join other scholars in our field in calling for greater institutionalized mechanisms for professionalization to promote equitable access to vital skills for graduate students (Calhoun 2020). To that end, we conclude by suggesting ways in which faculty and departments can close this gap in graduate training.

So far as I know the actual process of a transfer of grammatical categories from one language to another [or hybridization] has never been observed, although minor changes, like the adoption of a form here and there, and syntactic influences are known to occur. ... The question in which we are interested is not that of the theoretical definition of relation of languages as defined by Meillet ..., but merely a question of historical development. (Franz Boas 1929:2, 7)

Von Prince, Krajinović, and Krifka (2022) argue that irrealis is a crosslinguistically legitimate semantic category, and they define it in terms of a domain encompassing both future possibility and counterfactuality. In this response, we argue that this definition is too narrow, because it excludes past and present possibility and necessity. We suggest instead that the correct characterization is that irrealis expressions correlate with quantification over possible worlds—or in simpler terms, with modality. We then ask a compositional question: do irrealis expressions signal the presence of modality contributed by other morphemes in the clause, or do they contribute modality themselves? Based on a comparison between the languages in von Prince et al.'s sample and preliminary data from Lutuv (Lautu) Chin (South Central Tibeto-Burman, formerly called Kuki-Chin), we suggest that the answer to this question may vary from one language to the next, thereby contributing to a richer picture of how modal meaning is reflected and encoded crosslinguistically.

The challenge of supporting literacy among deaf children is as much linguistic as educational, since a major stumbling block can be the lack of a firm first language foundation. It is critical to meet this challenge, given the range of serious negative correlates to illiteracy. Students on the campuses of Gallaudet University and Swarthmore College collaborate to address this issue in an inter-institutional course in which we make bimodal-bilingual videobooks designed for enjoyable shared reading activities between deaf children and their caretakers. These videobooks bring a good signing model into the home and help develop a range of essential preliteracy skills.

This article reports on the successful implementation of the DISCOVERY METHOD in an undergraduate Generative Syntax course. Rather than reading textbooks on syntactic analysis and doing exercises to apply what was read, students embark on a nine-stage learning cycle consisting of interactive, guided, and independent work. They engage with problem sets to build their own analyses of syntactic phenomena step by step. This method—meant to resemble the work of real-life scientists—allows students to hypothesize, experiment, and build knowledge from trial and error (Kolb 1984, Prince 2004). To measure the effectiveness of our pedagogy, we analyzed course evaluations submitted from 2012 to the present. Learner feedback shows that they find the assignments and activities helpful, that the course challenges them to think and learn, and that they consider the weekly write-ups demanding, yet highly beneficial for their learning.

Grano et al. (2024, henceforth Grano et al.) present original data from Lutuv in order to explore the relationship of the irrealis category to notions of possibility and necessity. They make the following argument: possibilities and necessities of the past and the present can indeed involve quantification over both the actual and the counterfactual branches. Markers of typical irrealis contexts (future and counterfactual domains) are often found in expressions of necessity and possibility of the past and present. Grano et al. conclude that any statement that includes a reference to any index of the irrealis domain should qualify as an irrealis statement, even if the tense-aspect-mood (TAM) marker involved also includes a reference to actual indices.

Although Cherokee is known to show highly flexible clausal word order, the principles that predict speakers' preferences among possible orders are not extensively described. This article presents a new description of the grammatical properties that predict clausal word order in spoken Cherokee, based on a corpus study of word-order variation. Our results show that the placement of nominal expressions relative to verbs, and the relative order of nominal expressions within a clause, are determined in a probabilistic way by the cumulative interaction of several factors: REFERENTIAL ACCESSIBILITY, CONTRAST, AND THEMATIC ROLE. The findings suggest that thematic properties may have a greater word-order role than generally assumed in languages with nonconfigurational and/or polysynthetic properties.