gach wrote:
So how does this all work in linguistics? Are there perhaps differences between different fields of linguistics?
Yes, definitely. In, say, phonetics and psycholinguistics, books and monographs are very uncommon, and the journal article is the main publication method. On the other hand, in phonology and syntax, books are much more common. In computational linguistics, the conference proceedings paper is actually the most common publication - and some conferences are more prestigious than some journals! I've also noted, anecdotally, that book chapters are very common in morphology and historical linguistics, much more than some others.
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There are also more works published as monographs or in paper collection edited into books in linguistics than in natural scienses. How much editing and peer review goes into these?
It really really depends, mostly on the publisher. So, as zomp said, it's quite possible to publish a descriptive grammar as a book. If you publish with Cambridge University Press, it's gonna be peer-reviewed and extensively edited - you can be sure that such a grammar will be well-written. There are other publishers, though, which are less rigorous. I won't name names here but there is a publisher I'm thinking of that publishes lots of descriptive work, a lot of which is just a vague collection of field notes. Sure, it's useful to people who want to do further work on the language (family), but it's sometimes hard to say if it's really a contribution to generalizable scientific knowledge.
Same thing goes for book chapters. Some are very rigorously peer-reviewed and edited, some less so. In general, though, book chapters are considered less prestigious or less rigorous than journal articles, and often this is reflected in tenure review guidelines.
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A related question is how reliable do people consider work published only in dissertations. For PhD theses you certainly have a censor or two whose job it is to asses the quality of the work. But for master's theses the censors don't typically seem to have to be from outside your own department. You certainly can graduate without doing top research. For example at my own department (physics) master's theses are only really meant to be read by your supervisor and the censors and convince them that you've mastered the basics of your field. If the work is good enough, you will then write a refereed paper based on the science in the thesis and that will be the work you want people to read and cite.
That's generally the case in linguistics too, from my understanding. Many people will try to publish their PhD dissertation, either as a book or as a series of journal articles. Still, if that doesn't happen, or if the dissertation contains empirical or theoretical results that didn't get published, people will still refer to the dissertation. Some people leave academia or just don't publish their thesis work, for various reasons.
It's very rare for a master's thesis to be cited - usually if a master's thesis is good enough to be cited, it's good enough to be published.
gach wrote:
You have a fair point with the descriptive grammars and such and I sure have looked at some quite awful ones myself. Then again something gives me a feeling that actually forging data for a descriptive work wouldn't be too common (and maybe even possible to point out by experienced eye). I'd guess much more typical would be to cherry pick and bend your interpretations to better fit your favourite theoretical framework. Even in that case you'd sooner end up rendering the text unreadable to anyone else but those who adhere to the same theory than causing actual damage.
No description of a language is atheoretical. Forging or bending language data (of course) is very much frowned upon. Most phenomena that fit nicely into theory A usually also can be accounted for under theories B and C too (but not D!), and what actually happens in a paper really depends on the goal of the writer - are they writing about the language, or are they writing about the theory?