The editorial board and the publisher of Language Sciences confer the Sebeok-Love Award for the Best Article in Language Sciences on an annual basis.

The award is named after Thomas Sebeok, who founded the journal in 1968, and Nigel Love, who is the journal’s longest serving editor-in-chief to date. The award is given to the author of the best article from the journal’s six issue for the relevant year, as judged by the editors and editorial board. It comes with a small financial prize of £250, a year’s free subscription to the journal, and a certificate to recognise the author’s achievement. To be nominated for the award, the article must meet the following criteria:

1. The research reported should be of the highest quality.
2. The presentation should be well-written and well-argued.
3. The article must be a radical contribution that pushes the boundaries of the language sciences, thereby advancing the central goal of the journal.

The selection process for the award is a yearlong affair. During the year, the editors select a number of articles as Editors’ choice articles, all of which are featured on the journal website. These articles are the candidates for the award and are voted on by the editorial board. The board members can vote for any number of articles. The winner is the article with most votes. In addition to the winner, the article accruing the second most points is announced as the runner-up, and the article accruing third most points receive an honorary mention.

This year’s winner of the Sebeok-Love Award for the Best Article in Language Sciences is:

Ken Hirschkop (University of Waterloo, Canada) for the article “Inference and indexicality, or how to solve Bakhtin's problem with heteroglossia”, (Language Sciences, Volume 97, 101544)

This year’s runners-up are:

Takuya Inoue (Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan) for the article “Toward an ecological model of language: from cognitive linguistics to ecological semantics”, (Language Sciences, Volume 100, 101582)

and

Camila Alviar, Christopher T. Kello and Rick Dale (University of California, Merced, USA) for the article "Multimodal coordination and pragmatic modes in conversation" (Language Sciences, Volume 97, 101524)

As the editors of Language Sciences, we have no task more fulfilling than nominating those articles that we believe truly push the boundaries of our discipline. In these articles, as in so many other pieces of scholarship published in the journal, we see how the rich phenomena of language (or: languaging) can be investigated from a point of view that goes beyond a focus on signs as encoded relations between meaning and expression. We celebrate the journal’s distinctiveness in this regard, and we believe this distinctiveness places us at the forefront of trans-disciplinary work in the language sciences. As stated in the scope of the journal,

Language Sciences seeks to provide an outlet for radical and innovative work that enlarges our view of language and languaging. It aspires to be the foremost forum for transdisciplinary research on linguistic behaviour and languaging. We encourage contributions that take a broad view of language and languaging as coordinative, affiliative, and integrational activities that enable human living. Language Sciences is likewise a forum for debates on metatheoretical, epistemological, and axiological issues in the study of language and languaging, broadly conceived.

We are proud to have published the above-mentioned papers as outstanding examples of innovative and radical scholarship.

Sune Vork Steffensen, Editor-in-Chief

Laura Gurney, Associate Editor

David Karlander, Associate Editor

Matthew I. Harvey, Assistant Editor

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Sociolinguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)