Semantics & Pragmatics today published an underground classic, Craige Roberts’ famous paper “Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics”, which had previously been published in a volume of OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, and then circulated in a slighly edited manuscript form, but was never officially published. With the help of Anders Schoubye, Chris Brown, and Justin Cope, the old manuscript was transformed into LaTeX and formatted for the S&P stylesheet. Craige wrote a new afterword and prepared an annotated bibliography, which is linked from the afterword. We’re proud to be able to make this classic paper and the supplementary material available in an official publication.

Reissuing underground classics is a worthwhile undertaking, we believe. Some famous examples are David Kaplan’s “Demonstratives” published in Themes from Kaplan, Kripke on presupposition published in Linguistic Inquiry, and in a sense also Grice’s William James Lectures. There was also volume 7 of the series “Syntax and Semantics” entitled “Notes from the linguistic underground” (edited by Jim McCawley in 1976), featuring famous papers such as Karttunen’s “Discourse referents” and gems like “Why you can’t do so into the sink” by Lakoff & Ross. So, we are continuing a respectable tradition.

Question for our audience: which other underground classics in semantics and pragmatics should S&P consider publishing? You can email us at editors@semprag.org, comment on our Facebook page or our Google+ page, tweet (cc’ing @semprag), or leave a comment below.