Most cited works in Linguistics
Are these the most influential works in linguistics? These 100+ books and articles are all the works I could find on Google Scholar with at least 4000 citations as of today (January 7th, 2018; minor additions on Jan 10th and Jan 15th) and were arguably about linguistics, taken broadly. I am interested in learning about omissions. If you can find a linguistic work which is not on this list but which has been cited at least as many times, let me know. Alternatively, if you can argue that a work is more influential than these without having been cited as much, I’d be interested in hearing the arguments.
Caveats: I added up numbers for different formats of citation for Saussure, but didn’t do this for other works. I think that Google Scholar conflates elements with similar titles, for example Pustejovsky’s 1991 article and 1995 book of the same title (The Generative Lexicon) and Jackendoff’s 2002 and the 2003 précis of it in BBS. Journal titles appear in parentheses when I have noticed that an entry is a journal article (most of them are books, and a few are in collections). I have tried to enter the original date for works which have appeared in multiple editions. In my first pass, I only wrote down last names, and then when I suspected Google Scholar wasn’t displaying the original publication date, and had to look up a work, I added the first names of the authors; this is why some first names are included and some aren’t.
I have been inconsistent about including philosophers. Notable omissions: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (42342 citations), Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (12827), Frege’s Über Sinn und Bedeutung (8979 including English translation), Lewis’ Counterfactuals (5951) and On the Plurality of Worlds (5832); also Carnap, Tarsky, etc.
Update June 2020: I have added Biber et al 1999, with over 11,000 citations, and Biber 1988, with over 6,000. In the meantime most of the entries here have added a thousand citations or so, and I have just begun updating them. New citation numbers are followed by “2020” in parentheses. Order has not yet been adjusted to reflect changes.
| Author(s) | Year | Title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lakoff and Johnson | 1980 | Metaphors we Live by | 64194 (2020) |
| Austin, JL | 1962 | How to Do Things with Words | 54384 (2020) |
| Grice | 1975 | Logic and conversation | 39801 (2020) |
| Chomsky | 1965 | Aspects of the Theory of Syntax | 37855 (2020) |
| Saussure | 1916 | Course in General Linguistics | 29687 |
| Rabiner, LR | 1989 | A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition | 26290 |
| Searle | 1969 | Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language | 25607 |
| Halliday | 1985 | An Introduction to Functional Grammar | 25453 |
| Lakoff | 1987 | Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things | 25180 |
| Chomsky | 1995 | The Minimalist Program | 23898 |
| Chomsky | 1981 | Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures | 21348 |
| Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson | 1987 | Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage | 21229 |
| Chomsky | 1957 | Syntactic Structures | 20891 |
| Ellis, Rod | 1994 | The Study of Second Language Acquisition | 19573 |
| Sperber and Wilson | 1986 | Relevance: Communication and Cognition | 18906 |
| Brown, H. Douglas | 1980 | Principles of Language Learning and Teaching | 17043 |
| Stroop, JR | 1935 | Studies of interference in serial verbal interactions (J Exp Psych) | 15906 |
| Fairclough, Norman | 1989 | Language and Power | 15477 |
| Krashen, S | 1987 | Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition | 15352 |
| Langacker | 1987 | Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites | 15299 |
| Quirk et al | 1985 | A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language | 15074 |
| Fodor | 1983 | The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology | 14774 |
| Chomsky and Halle | 1968 | The Sound Pattern of English | 14162 |
| Johnson-Laird, Philip | 1983 | Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness | 12807 |
| Chomsky | 1986 | Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use | 12258 |
| Quine | 1960 | Word and Object | 12003 |
| Krashen, Stephen | 1985 | The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications | 11901 |
| Pinker | 1994 | The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language | 11647 |
| Halliday, M.A.K. | 1978 | Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning | 11454 |
| Brown | 1973 | A First Language: The Early Stages | 11209 |
| Gee, James Paul | 1990 | Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses | 11154 |
| Fairclough, Norman | 2003 | Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research | 10560 |
| Lenneberg | 1967 | The Biological Foundations of Language | 10440 |
| Labov | 1972 | Sociolinguistic Patterns | 10284 |
| Krashen, Stephen | 1981 | Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning | 10165 |
| Brown, Gillian and George Yule | 1983 | Discourse Analysis | 9864 |
| Hymes, Dell H. | 1972 | On communicative competence | 9732 |
| Biber, Johansson, Leech, and Finegan | 1999 | The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English | 11298 (2020) |
| Fillmore | 1967 | The case for case | 9727 |
| Canale and Swain | 1980 | Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing (Applied Linguistics) |
9365 |
| Jakobson | 1960 | Linguistics and poetics | 9273 |
| Chomsky | 2001 | Derivation by phase | 8934 |
| Gee, James Paul | 1999 | An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method | 8904 |
| Whorf | 1956 | Language, Thought and Reality | 8677 |
| Chomsky | 2000 | Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework | 8608 |
| Goldberg | 1995 | Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure | 8466 |
| Fodor | 1975 | The Language of Thought | 8465 |
| Clark, Herbert H. | 1996 | Using Language | 8448 |
| O’Malley, JM and AU Chamot | 1990 | Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition | 8287 |
| Shiffrin, RM, and W Schneider | 1977 | Controlled and automatic human information processing II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending, and a general theory (Psych Rev) | 8274 |
| Putnam | 1979 | Philosophical Papers: Volume 2, Mind, Language, and Reality | 8228 |
| Labov | 1972 | Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular | 8114 |
| Paivio, Allan | 1986 | Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach | 8041 |
| Prince and Smolensky | 1993 | Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar | 7994 |
| Chomsky | 1968 | Language and Mind | 7909 |
| Selinker | 1972 | Interlanguage | 7763 |
| Sapir | 1921 | Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech | 7587 |
| Chomsky | 1986 | Barriers | 7461 |
| Nation, ISP | 2001 | Learning Vocabulary in Another Language | 7217 |
| Kayne | 1994 | The Antisymmetry of Syntax | 7170 |
| Jackendoff | 1972 | Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar | 7169 |
| Hopper and Traugott | 1993 | Grammaticalization | 6958 |
| Marcus et al | 1993 | Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank | 6776 |
| Hutchinson and Waters | 1987 | English for Specific Purposes | 6764 |
| Comrie | 1976 | Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems | 6758 |
| Halliday and Hasan | 1989 | Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective | 8079 (2020) |
| Crystal | 1991 | Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics | 8429 (2020) |
| McNeill | 1992 | Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought | 8644 (2020) |
| Lakoff | 1993 | The contemporary theory of metaphor (in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed.) | 8367 (2020) |
| Baker, Colin | 1993 | Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism | 8498 (2020) |
| Lyons | 1968 | Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics | 7383 (2020) |
| Ross | 1967 | Constraints on Variables in Syntax | 6954 (2020) |
| Levin | 1993 | English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation |
7469 (2020) |
| Hymes, Dell | 1974 | Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach | 7778 (2020) |
| Pustejovsky | 1995 | The generative lexicon (also 1991 article in Computational Linguistics) | 7098 (2020) |
| Talmy | 2000 | Toward a Cognitive Semantics | 7255 (2020) |
| Dowty | 1979 | Word Meaning and Montague Grammar: The Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and in Montague’s PTQ | 7459 (2020) |
| Chomsky | 1959 | A review of BF Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Language) | 6865 (2020) |
| Selkirk, E | 1986 | Phonology and Syntax: The Relationship between Sound and Structure | 6106 |
| Baker | 1988 | Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing | 7237 (2020) |
| Rizzi | 1997 | The fine structure of the left periphery | 7261 (2020) |
| Ladefoged and Johnson | 1993 | A Course in Phonetics | 7348 (2020) |
| Skehan, Peter | 1998 | A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning | 7276 (2020) |
| Pollard and Sag | 1994 | Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar | 6528 (2020) |
| Jackendoff | 1990 | Semantic Structures | 6695 (2020) |
| Biber | 1988 | Variation across Speech and Writing | 6687 (2020) |
| Miller et al | 1990 | Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database | 6350 (2020) |
| Labov | 2010 | Principles of Linguistic Change, Cognitive and Cultural Factors |
5743 |
| Jackendoff | 1983 | Semantics and Cognition | 5723 |
| Chomsky | 1980 | Rules and Representations | 5716 |
| Labov | 1966 | The Social Stratification of English in New York City | 5666 |
| Davidson, D | 1980 | Essays on Actions and Events: Philosophical Essays | 5632 |
| Tomasello | 2009 | Constructing a Language | 5582 |
| Krashen, SD, and TD Terrell | 1983 | The natural approach: Language acquisition in the classroom | 5514 |
| Vendler, Z | 1969 | Linguistics in Philosophy | 5507 |
| Ellis, R | 2003 | Task-based Language Learning and Teaching | 5468 |
| Schmidt, RW | 1990 | The role of consciousness in second language learning (Applied Linguistics) | 5377 |
| Abney | 1987 | The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect | 5276 |
| Wardaugh, Ronald | 1986 | An Introduction to Sociolinguistics | 5204 |
| Pollock | 1989 | Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP (Linguistic Inquiry) | 5106 |
| Fauconnier, Gilles | 1985 | Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language | 5077 |
| Comrie | 1981 | Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology | 5067 |
| Heim | 1982 | The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases | 5029 |
| Lambrecht | 1994 | Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents | 5022 |
| MacLeod, CM | 1991 | Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review | 5017 |
| Kamp, H, and U Reyle | 1993 | From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Model-Theoretic Semantics of Natural Language | 5009 |
| Chomsky | 1975 | Reflections on Language | 4994 |
| Cruse, D.A. | 1986 | Lexical Semantics | 4947 |
| Taylor | 1989 | Linguistic Categorization | 4941 |
| Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch | 2002 | The faculty of language: What is is, who has it, and how did it evolve? (Science) | 4940 |
| Smith, Frank | 1971 | Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read | 4898 |
| Huddleston and Pullum | 2002 | The Cambridge Grammar of English | 4873 |
| Givón | 1984 | Syntax: An Introduction | 4774 |
| Sweetser | 1990 | From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure | 4714 |
| Chomsky | 1970 | Remarks on nominalization | 4709 |
| Davidson, D | 1984 | Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation: Philosophical Essays | 4694 |
| Hopper and Thompson | 1980 | Transitivity in grammar and discourse (Language) | 4687 |
| Halle and Marantz | 1993 | Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection | 4680 |
| Cinque | 1999 | Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-linguistic Perspective | 4674 |
| Craik, FIM, and E Tulving | 1975 | Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory | 4672 |
| Barwise and Perry | 1991 | Situations and Attitudes | 4651 |
| Jespersen | 1940 | A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles: Volume 5, Syntax | 4627 |
| Dowty | 1991 | Thematic proto-roles and argument selection | 4594 |
| Gass, Susan M. | 1994 | Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course | 4580 |
| Palmer, Frank R. | 1986 | Mood and Modality | 4577 |
| Grimshaw | 1990 | Argument structure | 4574 |
| Jackendoff | 2002 | Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar Evolution (also précis in Brain and Behavioral Science) | 4529 |
| Bybee | 1985 | Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form | 4494 |
| Greenberg | 1963 | Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements | 4384 |
| Halliday | 1975 | Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language | 4379 |
| Jespersen | 1924 | The Philosophy of Grammar | 4378 |
| Nespor and Vogel | 1986 | Prosodic Phonology | 4352 |
| Rizzi | 1990 | Relativized Minimality | 4327 |
| Ladd | 1996 | Intonational Phonology | 4317 |
| Strawson, PF/td> | 1959 | Individuals | 4304 |
| De Beaugrande, Robert and Wolfgang U. Dressler | 1981 | Introduction to Text Linguistics | 4254 |
| Chafe, WL | 1976 | Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view | 4254 |
| Liberman et al | 1967 | Perception of the speech code (Psychological Review) | 4169 |
| Croft and Cruse | 2004 | Cognitive Linguistics | 4131 |
| Goldberg | 2006 | Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language | 4128 |
| Talmy | 1985 | Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms | 4107 |
| Eggins, Suzanne | 1994 | Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics | 4101 |
| Tannen | 1989 | Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse | 4830 (2020) |
