Linguistics Working Papers

Working papers are an important type of scholarly publication in linguistics. Where other fields may view the working paper as a draft or informal prototype to a published peer-reviewed journal article, many linguistics working papers are terminal publications.

Through subscriptions, gifts and donations, and exchanges through the graduate student-run Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, the Penn Libraries collection includes long or complete retrospective runs of all major linguistics working paper series in print format. These include MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Chicago Linguistic Society main session, regional session, and parasession meeting papers, Proceedings of the Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers, Working Papers on Language Universals (Stanford), Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory (Cornell), and Working Papers in Linguistics (Honolulu). Overseas academic working paper series runs include Sophia Linguistica (Tokyo), Working Papers in Linguistics (Venice), and Papers in New Guinea Linguistics (Canberra).

Penn's own working paper series are represented, starting with Transformations and Discourse Analysis Projects (later, Papers. 1957-1969) and including The Penn Review of Linguistics and Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (1977-present), Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (Graduate School of Education, 1984-present), and Working Papers in Romance Literatures and Philology (1997).

Penn Libraries working paper series in linguistics are held in the Van Pelt Library and in LIBRA. Our holdings of working paper series may be found in the Penn Libraries catalog.

Many present-day working papers appear online in open access versions, with print publication slowly becoming unavailable. Discovering linguistic working papers can be difficult, as their publishing offices are often staffed by current linguistics department graduate students and bibliographic control depends upon institutional repositories and publisher websites (Cascadilla Press's Cascadilla Proceedings Project, for example). The major bibliographic databases — BLLDB, Linguistic Bibliography, and LLBA — cover working papers unevenly.