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Semantics & Pragmatics is published by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Semantics & Pragmatics is a diamond open-access peer-reviewed journal publishing high quality, original, self-contained research articles on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. Originally founded as a co-journal of the LSA’s eLanguage publishing platform in 2008, Semantics & Pragmatics transitioned to a freestanding journal published by the LSA in 2013. The publication of Semantics and Pragmatics is part of the LSA's larger effort to broaden and expand its publishing operations to serve the entire linguistics community. 

While the core target audience of Semantics & Pragmatics is academic linguists, we 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 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.

Open Access

The Semantics and Pragmatics team is committed to full open-access publishing - free to publish, free to access. We believe that any publishing model other than full open-access compromises the free flow of scholarly information to at least some degree. Furthermore, we believe that the adoption of a fully open-access publishing model will lead to a huge reduction in the costs incurred by individual, institutional, and governmental stakeholders, e.g. University Libraries. Semantics and Pragmatics aims not only to be a top quality journal in its own right, but also to serve as an existence proof of the following precept: that a fully open-access publishing model would be both viable and desirable for linguistics as a whole. Read more about the LSA's Open Access Publications program.

Support

Even full open-access publication is associated with costs. Although our costs are well below what would be normal for a typical for-profit scientific journal, external support is vital to develop and streamline our future operations, and to offset operational, production, and hosting costs. To maintain full open-access, the journal relies on financial and infrastructure support from the LSA, and currently receives further support from the University of Texas and MIT. We also rely on the extraordinary and supererogatory voluntary effort of editors and reviewers.

Supporting Open Access to S&P Content

Donations to support the LSA's Open Access Publishing Program are gratefully accepted throughout the year. In 2021, two donors are pleased to match all contributions, up to $10,000. Read more. Donations in support of the journal’s running and development costs may be made to the LSA's Open Access Publications Fund.

Complete editorial information about Semantics and Pragmatics, as well as information about how to submit a manuscript, is available at here.