The December 2014 issue of Language (Volume 90, Number 4) is now available online to LSA members and other Language subscribers. Highlights from this issue of Language include:

• The winner of this year's Best Paper in Language Award, which proposes an explanation for why suffixes are more common than prefixes in the languages of the world. "Asymmetries in the prosodic phrasing of function words: Another look at the suffixing preference", by Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (Universität zu Köln), argues that prosodic word and phrase boundaries occur more commonly between function words which precede a given word than they do function words following it, leading the latter to be more commonly fused onto words as suffixes.

• A paper that questions whether the Scripps National Spelling Bee should be more accomodating of contestants who speak nonstandard varieties of English. "Jasmine and the Bee: Spelling word-initial [t^h] in English", by Gerald R. McMenamin (CSU - Fresno) and Lindsay N. Kerr (Georgetown), appears in our new section on Language & Public Policy.

• Our Perspectives section, which publishes academic papers with responses and commentary from other linguists. This quarter, Perspectives features "How to investigate linguistic diversity: Lessons from the Pacific Northwest" by Henry Davis (UBC), Carrie Gillon (Arizona State), and Lisa Matthewson (UBC) with three responses.

• Articles on "High school linguistics" and "A tactile IPA magnet-board system" in our "Teaching Linguistics" section

Learn more about our current issue of Language on Project MUSE.