Enrico Torre
Università degli Studi di Genova
The first issue of WORD was launched in 1945, announced on its front cover as “the journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, devoted to the study of linguistic science in all its aspects.” At the time, the only other general linguistics journal published in the United States was Language, the organ of the Linguistic Society of America, which – at least according to the received view – was firmly in the hands of mechanist post-Bloomfieldians. Indeed, under Bernard Bloch’s (1907–1965) editorship, most contributions accepted in Language were either papers on historical linguistics or strictly formal descriptions of linguistic phenomena. As scholars of the mechanist orientation were increasingly perceived as becoming elitist and the field seemed to be narrowing, a sense of discontent began to spread among fellow linguists who did not recognize themselves in that approach (Householder 1978). Read more ›
