Dr. h.c. Johan Rooryck – an in-depth interview

Abstract

On 1 September 2022, professor of linguistics and director of cOAlition S Johan Rooryck was created a doctor honoris causa at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. In this in-depth interview, Rooryck reflects on his career so far and shares his vision of a future where scholar-led, fair and equitable open access prevails over commercial publishing structures.
 Johan Rooryck starts out by explaining how he became the editor-in-chief of the high-ranking journal Lingua in 1999, how his relations with the publisher Elsevier became increasingly strained, and how he succeeded in bringing all his co-editors along in a sensational break with Elsevier. Instead, they launched the fully open access journal Glossa (now a high-ranking journal of general linguistics) at the platform Open Library of Humanities, in 2015. Rooryck in particular dwells on the non-commercial model known as Diamond Open Access, with no charges facing either readers or authors. Speaking on behalf of Plan S and the cOAlition S, whose executive director he became in 2019, Rooryck also broadens the view to all forms of open access, including open access to books and research data. At the end, he looks ahead to the future, when faced with the final, fundamental question: are you an optimist?
 First published online: September 12, 2022

Propositionale Argumente im Sprachvergleich / Propositional Arguments in Cross-Linguistic Research

“…Auf funktionale Parallelen zwischen reduzierten Parenthesen und Satzadverbialen ist immer wieder hingewiesen worden. Rooryck (2001) Zur Motivierung, wenn auch nicht eigentlich prinzipiellen Herleitung, des ten Zusammenhangs sind zwei Sachverhalte interessant. Einmal Grammatikalisierungsprozesse, in deren Resultat satzförmige Parenthesen zunächst reduziert werden und dann weiter in einzelne lexikalische Elemente übergehen, zum anderen gewisse Fälle von Relativ-und Vergleichsätzen, bei denen ein Pronomen verstummen kann.…”

Grammatical and Lexical Dialectal Variation in Spanish: The Case of deísmo

“…First, while deísmo and dequeísmo need not be coincident phenomena, the two have been related in the literature and feature an unselected particle de heading a subordinate sentence. Second, it has been proposed that some complementizers are indirect evidentiality markers (see Rooryck 2001): for example, that in English or van in Brabant Dutch (Van Craenenbroeck 2004); or certain uses of que in root sentences in Spanish Soriano 2014 andSánchez López 2020, among others). Given that in Section 2 we have shown that the particle de is a complementizer, it makes sense to ask whether it encodes evidential or modal values.…”

“…According to Rooryck (2001), Aikhenvald (2018) and Sánchez López (2020), among the expressions (or grammatical strategies) that encode the source of information are complementizers. As we will see, at least that in English, van in Brabant Dutch and de in Spanish have been studied as complementizers encoding evidential values.…”

Inferential Interrogatives with qué in Spanish

“…Interestingly, inferential interrogatives with qué show a behavior that is similar to inferential evidentials crosslinguistically. Bhadra (2018) analyzes the evidential marker naki in Bangla as a case of indirect evidence (Rooryck 2001) that can occur in different types of sentences, including interrogatives: (16) Sita baRi giy-ech-e naki? Sita home go-PERF-3SG NAKI 'Sita has gone home.…”