About

Focus and Scope

Semantics of Natural Languages (SNL) is a linguistics journal dedicated to the study of meaning in natural languages, with a particular focus on the relation between meaning and linguistic structure. While SNL is firmly grounded in semantics, it welcomes contributions that draw on insights from related fields such as logic, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and cognition, typology and the core domains of linguistics — provided the work is specifically directed toward linguists and advances our understanding of semantics.

A central aim of SNL is to elucidate how meaning interacts with linguistic structure, while at the same time broadening the empirical foundation of semantics research beyond English. Articles typically take a particular linguistic phenomenon as their point of departure and approach it with formal rigor, often making use of concepts from logic, philosophy of language, or mathematics.

SNL values a diversity of methods and perspectives: contributions range from formal analyses and theoretical models, to experimental investigations of semantic questions, to computationally explicit implementations. Data sources include, among others, introspective judgments, fieldwork, typological studies, experimental results, computational evidence and corpora.

In addition to full-length research articles, SNL also publishes short squibs and contributions that engage with relevant books and articles through critical remarks and replies.

Journal History

SNL is a new journal building on the tradition of Natural Language Semantics (1992-2026).

Publication Frequency

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in making content publicly available.

Publication Fees

There are no publication fees. This journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). Unlike many open-access publishers, the OLH does not charge any author fees. This does not mean that we do not have costs. Instead, our costs are paid by an international library consortium.

Voluntary Author Contributions

Authors who have access to institutional funds or grant funding earmarked for Open Access publication (via a research grant or through their institution's department or library)—and only those authors—are kindly asked to use those funds to cover the publication costs for their article in Semantics of Natural Languages through a Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC). The VAC is genuinely voluntary. Whether or not the author is able to contribute makes absolutely no difference to editorial decision-making on the submission. For further information please see the publisher's policy on VACs.

Archiving, Indexing and Citation Metrics

Semantics of Natural Languages is archived and indexed according to the publisher's policy.