Publication | Special issue

Special Issue: Ethics in linguistics

By drawing on the personal experiences of contributors based in different institutions and countries, the articles in this special issue provide a fairly broad overview of ethics practices and concerns in different localities (though not globally, as we had originally hoped), showing, as one student in my ethics course put it, how much more there is to this topic “beyond its stilted conception as box-ticking”.

Author

Guest Editor: Marina Terkourafi

Date

09 April 2025

Links

De Gruyter Mouton

About

The title of this special issue, “Ethics in Linguistics”, is taken from a 5-day workshop organized at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, in May 2022, where preliminary versions of some of the papers featured here were first presented.This title naturally brings up a further question: is there anything specifically linguistic about ethics, and if so, what? On the one hand, if ethics and ethical behaviour are a shared concern of academics across the board, then the same standards ought to apply to all and it ought to be enough to familiarize novices (and ourselves) with these standards in order to carry out our work with integrity. On the other hand, even among linguists, it is not uncommon to hear that ethics is only relevant to some linguistic subfields – notably, those engaged in research with “human subjects” – while others can continue to do things as they always have or with minimal adjustments (e.g., those imposed on them externally by Institutional Review Boards or IRBs; see below). Even among those working with “human subjects”, ethics is sometimes treated as incidental inasmuch as they focus on language structure, studied separately from social considerations. Ethical considerations (at least with respect to participants) can then translate into simply ensuring that everyone’s data is given equal weight and taken into account during the analysis.