Today I woke up to an email from the editor of Biolinguistics informing me that my manuscript “A parallel derivation theory of adjuncts” had been accepted for publication. I was quite relieved, especially since I had been expecting some news about my submission for a couple of days—the ability to monitor the progress of submissions on a journal’s website is a decidedly mixed blessing—and there was a definite possibility in my mind that it could have been rejected.
It was also a relief because it’s been a long road with this paper. I first wrote about the kernel of its central idea—that syntactic adjuncts were entirely separate objects from their “hosts”—in my thesis, and I presented it a couple of times within the University of Toronto Linguistics Department a few times. I first realized that it had some legs when it was accepted as a talk at the 2020 LSA Meeting in New Orleans, and I started working on it in earnest in the spring and summer of 2020, submitting the first manuscript version to a different journal in August 2020.
If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my reactions to the peer-review process in real time, but it’s worth summarizing. Versions of this manuscript underwent peer-review at multiple journals and in every case there were one or two constructive reviews—some positive reviews, and some negative reviews that nevertheless pointed out serious but fixable issues—but invariably there was one reviewer who was clearly hostile to the manuscript—there was often sarcasm and vague comments.
I’m sure the manuscript improved over the various submissions, but I believe that the main reason that the paper will finally be published is because the editor of Biolinguistics, Kleanthes Grohmann, recognized and agreed with me that one of the reviewers was being unreasonable, so I definitely owe him my gratitude.
There’s more edits to go, but you can look forward to seeing my paper in Biolinguistics in the near future.
Well done, Dan. Persistence pays.
Thanks Dad! Now, if only publishing journal articles paid…