Author Guidelines

Submission information

Glossa is dedicated to general linguistics and publishes contributions from all areas of linguistics, provided they contain theoretical implications that shed light on the nature of language and the language faculty. Contributions should be of interest to all linguists, independently of their own specialisation.

Submissions should be made electronically through this website.

Prior to submission, please add a word count (including footnotes and references) directly under the paper title -- note that word counts must not exceed 13,000 words. Then convert your paper into a single PDF file, containing all tables and figures. Non-PDF files or separately provided files may be returned prior to review. Separate image files may be requested if the submission is accepted for publication.

Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript. Failure to do so may delay the processing of your submission. A downloadable version of the style guide is available here. Text formatting in accordance with the stylesheet is required for the accepted version only.

For LaTeX submissions, please download the LaTeX resources here.

NOTE: All files must be anonymised during the initial submission. Only after editorial acceptance should you add author details to the manuscript files.

Once a submission has been completed, the submitting author is able to fully track the status of the paper and complete requested revisions via their online profile.

Article types

Research articles must describe the outcomes and application of unpublished original research. These should make a substantial contribution to knowledge and understanding in the subject matter and should be supported by relevant figures and a representative array of data. Research articles must initially be no more than 13,000 words in length, and can be extended to a maximum of 15,000 words after revisions. Authors are allowed to add appendices with supplementary material that will be hosted separately from the article itself, and receive their own, properly referenced, DOI. These materials will not be typeset (see the below 'Structure' section on how to provide supplementary/data files).
Overview articles must describe the state-of-the art in a given subdiscipline or a specific topic in linguistics. They should be very accessible, aimed at an audience of MA students or interested colleagues. Overview articles must be no more than 13,000 words in length. Authors are allowed to add appendices with supplementary material that will be hosted separately from the article itself, and receive their own, properly referenced, DOI. These materials will not be typeset (see the below 'Structure' section on how to provide supplementary/data files).
Book reviews present critical appraisals of recent books in linguistics, with a preference for monographs, handbooks, and grammars. Unsolicited reviews are discouraged. However, Glossa will consider requests, suggestions, or proposals for potential reviews and examine these on a case-by-case basis. Authors should first contact the co-editors-in-chief. Reviews should critically engage with the relevant body of extant literature of the book's topic, and provide a new perspective on its scholarly contribution. Glossa does not publish book reviews of collected volumes that merely provide concise descriptions the contributions contained in these volumes. Book reviews should be no longer than 3,000 words in length.
Review articles present longer critical appraisals of one or more recent books, and contain an original contribution or perspective on the book(s) reviewed. Review articles will be reviewed by the editors and/or members of the editorial board. Review articles should be no greater than 6,000 words in length.
Squibs are short notes (5,000 words max.) that make a scintillating point by calling attention to a theoretically unexpected observation about language but without the need for a developed analysis or solution.
Special Collections are collections of papers devoted to a particular topic, and edited by a team of guest editors. This usually means that authors are invited by the guest editors to submit to an SC. Nevertheless, contributions to Special Collections are subject to the usual editorial processes of blind peer review. The main concern for SCs is to achieve a strong thematic unity, avoiding the impression of conference proceedings. The Glossa policy on SCs is to prefer small collections of papers that constitute a tight fit, over very general ones with contributions that are only loosely connected thematically. The papers in an SC should be strongly complementary, and ‘talk’ to each other. In short, a SC should avoid the impression that it is a collection of standalone papers on the same topic from different, insular perspectives. More information about Special Collections can be found here.

All word limits include referencing and citation. Please note that if you have data or supplementary files, they should be treated as outlined in the section Data Availability/Supplementary files below, and not as part of the main submission file.

Structure

Title page

To ensure blind peer review, please only list the title and abstract on the submitted manuscript file.

The title should not contain any capitalisation apart from the first word and words that need capitals in any context. In the final version of the accepted paper, the title is followed by the first and last name of the author(s), their affiliation, and e-mail. First names should not include only initials.

Anonymisation: The names of all authors, affiliations, contact details, biography (optional) and the corresponding author details must be completed online as part of the submission process, but should not be added to the submitted files until after editorial acceptance.

Abstract

Articles must have the main text prefaced by an abstract of no more than 250 words summarising the main arguments and conclusions of the article.

A list of up to six key words may be placed below the abstract (optional).

The abstract and keywords should also be added to the metadata when making the initial online submission. The abstract is automatically attached to the email message inviting reviewers to review the paper.

Main text

Articles are subdivided into numbered sections (and possibly subsections, numbered 1.1 etc., and subsubsections, numbered 1.1.1 etc.), with a bold-faced heading in each case. The numbering always begins with 1, not 0. Section headings do not end with a period, and have no special capitalisation.

Unnumbered sections

The conclusion is the last numbered section. It may be followed by several unnumbered sections, in this order:

Abbreviations
Data availability/Supplementary files
Ethics and consent
Funding information
Acknowledgements
Competing interests
Authors' contributions

Of these, only the Competing interests statement is mandatory, and, if your paper contains glossed examples, the Abbreviations section. More explanation on the content of these sections is provided below.

Abbreviations (if applicable)

Provide explanation of abbreviations used in the manuscript.

Data Availability / Supplementary Files (if applicable)

The journal requires authors to make all data, stimuli and data analysis scripts associated with their submission openly available at the time of submission, in accordance with the FAIR principles. More information can be found on the Journal Policies page. If data/supplementary files are to be associated with the submission, please follow one of the options below:

1) Upload the files to an open repository and add to your manuscript the DOI provided.

We recommend an open repository such as the Open Science Framework, which allows you to create a "project" under which you can upload relevant files (datasets, analysis scripts, experimental materials, etc.). The project will be associated with a unique DOI. You can then include in your manuscript a citation of the OSF entry and/or a link to the project on OSF (this makes the files more findable and more citable). Other commonly used repositories are Zenodo, IRIS and the Harvard database.

During review, please be sure that the link to the repository is anonymized to maintain a fully double masked review process. Instructions for doing this on the OSF are here.

2) Upload the files to the journal system during the submission process, as 'data files'.

The journal will then host them as part of the publication and provide them with a DOI (most suitable for non-data files or very short pieces of information, although option 1 is also suitable for these if the author prefers).

In both cases, a 'Data Availability' or 'Supplementary Files' section must be added prior to the reference list with a title and short summary of the content of each file. If option 1 was selected, you should also provide the DOI in this section. Ideally, supplementary files are also cited in the main text, e.g.:

Supplementary file 1: Appendix. Scientific data related to the experiments. [DOI]

Please note that neither option will result in the files being typeset, so please ensure that they are in the publishable format when you complete the upload.

Ethics and consent (if applicable)

When reporting a study with human participants, the manuscript should include a statement confirming that the study was approved (or granted exemption) by the appropriate institutional and/or national research ethics committee (including the name of the ethics committee), certifying that the study was performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments (or comparable ethical standards). If a study was granted exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should also be stated, including the reasons for the exemption. All information provided in the manuscript and in supplementary materials such as raw data sets should be stripped of identifying details to protect human subjects’ privacy and anonymity.

Funding Information (if applicable)

Should the research have received a funding grant then the grant provider and grant number should be detailed.

Acknowledgements (optional)

Any acknowledgements must be headed and in a separate paragraph, placed after the main text but before the reference list.

Competing interests (required)

If any of the authors have any competing interests then these must be declared. Guidelines for competing interests can be found here. If there are no competing interests to declare then the following statement should be present: The author(s) has/have no competing interests to declare.

Authors' contributions (optional)

A sentence or a short paragraph detailing the roles that each author held to contribute to the authorship of the submission. Individuals listed must fit within the definition of an author, as per Glossa's Authorship Guidelines.

References

All references cited within the submission must be listed at the end of the main text file.

Permissions and licenses

The author is responsible for obtaining all permissions required prior to submission of the manuscript. Permission and owner details should be mentioned for all third-party content included in the submission or used in the research.

If a method or tool is introduced in the study, including software, questionnaires, and scales, the license this is available under and any requirement for permission for use should be stated. If an existing method or tool is used in the research, it is the author's responsibility to check the license and obtain the necessary permissions. Statements confirming that permission was granted should be included in the Materials and Methods section.

All articles in Glossa are published under a CC BY 4.0 license. This means that the author keeps sufficient intellectual property rights to reuse all materials in their article as they see fit. This includes the right to republish the article elsewhere (e.g. in a collected volume or anthology), and to share the article in a repository or archive of their choice. The CC BY 4.0 license also means that the author grants others the right to remix, transform, and build upon the materials in the article for any purpose, on the condition that proper credit is given (as is customary in academic work). Please note that Glossa holds no rights over published articles.

Style sheet

This style sheet is based on the The Generic Style Rules for Linguistics (version of December 2014), developed under a CC-BY licence by Martin Haspelmath. It was slightly adapted for Glossa by Waltraud Paul and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd in November 2015 and October 2021.

1. Parts of the text

The title should not contain any capitalisation, apart from the first word and words that require capitals in all contexts. The title is followed by the first and last name of the author(s), their affiliation, and e-mail. First names should not include only initials. To ensure double-blind review, any information identifying the author(s) should be removed from the text for as long as it is under review.

Articles are preceded by an abstract of 100–300 words and up to six keywords. The Abstract and Keywords should also be added to the metadata when making the initial online submission.

Articles are subdivided into numbered sections (and possibly subsections, numbered 1.1 etc., and subsubsections, numbered 1.1.1 etc.), with a bold-faced heading in each case. Subsection headings also have italics. The numbering always begins with 1, not 0. Section headings do not end with a period, and have no special capitalization.

The conclusion is the last numbered section. It may be followed by several unnumbered sections as applicable: Abbreviations, Supplementary files, Ethics and consent, Funding information, Acknowledgements, Competing Interests, and Authors' contributions, in this order. Of these, only the Competing Interests statement is mandatory, and, if your paper contains glossed examples, the Abbreviations section. The last part is the list of bibliographical references (References). For the style of references, see below.

2. Numbered examples and formulae

Examples from languages other than English must be glossed (with word-by-word alignment) and translated (cf. the Leipzig Glossing Rules recommended as basic guidelines here). Example numbers are enclosed in parentheses, and left-aligned. Example sentences usually have normal capitalization at the beginning and normal punctuation. The gloss line has no capitalization and no punctuation. Examples in footnotes are numbered with lower case Roman numerals enclosed between brackets.

Ungrammatical examples can be given a parenthesized idiomatic translation. A literal translation may be given in parentheses after the idiomatic translation.

For languages with non-Roman writing systems, a standard form of romanisation should be used in lieu of the original writing system. State which standard has been used, referring to relevant sources. For articles on Mandarin Chinese, the Pinyin transliteration should include tone marks.

The use of any nonstandard layout in examples beyond what is illustrated above is strongly discouraged, as this will increase the production time (and cost) of your paper, as well as increase the chances of the HTML version format including errors in some browsers/screen sizes. If you feel an example needs additional explanation, try as much as possible to provide this in the text that goes with the example. If nonstandard layout is essential, then please raise this with the editorial team to discuss the options available.

Formulae must be proofed carefully by the author. Editors will not edit formulae. If special software has been used to create formulae, the way it is laid out is the way they will appear in the publication.

3. Use of footnotes/endnotes

Use footnotes rather than endnotes (we refer to these as "Notes" in the online publication). These will appear at the bottom of each page. All notes should be used only where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed.

Avoid using notes for purposes of referencing, with in-text citations used instead. If in-text citations cannot be used, a source can be cited as part of a note. Please insert the footnote marker after the end punctuation.

The footnote reference number normally follows a period or a comma, though exceptionally it may follow an individual word. Footnote numbers start with 1. Examples in footnotes have the numbers (i), (ii), etc.

4. Tables and figures

Tables and figures are treated as floats in typesetting. This means that their placement on the page will not necessarily be where you put it in your manuscript, as this may lead to large parts of the page ending up white (e.g., when a table or figure does not fit on the current page and wraps onto the following page). For this reason, you must always refer to tables and figures in the running text (e.g. “… as shown in Table 1”). Do not refer to tables and figures using the words "following", "below" or "above", as the final placement of your table or figure may be different from where you placed them in your manuscript.

Tables and figures are numbered consecutively. Each table and each figure has a caption. The caption is placed below both figures and tables, with the figure or table number in bold. The caption ends in a full stop.

All figures must be uploaded separately as supplementary files once the paper is accepted, if possible in colour and at a resolution of at least 300dpi. No file should be larger than 20MB. Standard formats accepted are: jpg, tiff, gif, png, eps. For line drawings, please provide the original vector file (e.g. .ai, or .eps).

Tables must be created using a word processor's table function, not tabbed text. Tables should be included in the manuscript.

Tables should not include:

Rotated text
Colour to denote meaning (it will not display the same on all devices)
Images
Diagonal lines
Multiple parts (e.g., "Table 1a" and "Table 1b"). These should either be merged into one table, or separated into "Table 1" and "Table 2".

If there are more columns than can fit on a single page, the table will be rotated by 90 degrees to fit on the page. Do not use tables that cannot fit onto a single page.

Tree diagrams should be treated as examples, not as figures. If your figure or tree diagram includes text, then for the best match with the typeset text use font Charis Sil, or Fira Sans. These fonts also support the International Phonetical Alphabet (IPA) symbols.

5. In-text citations

The short reference form used in the text consists of the author’s surname and the publication year, followed by page numbers where necessary. Brackets surround the year, except if the citation is already inside brackets, in which case there are no brackets around the year. If there are more than two authors, the surname of the first author plus et al. can be used. If all the authors are listed, they are all separated by an ampersand.

Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 276–280) point out that the northern dialects of English show more morphological innovations (and are morphologically more simple) than the southern English dialects. The notation we use to represent this is borrowed from theories according to which φ-features occur in a so-called feature geometry (Gazdar & Pullum 1982).
Bannard et al. (2009) = Bannard & Lieven & Tomasello (2009)

When multiple citations are listed, they are separated by semicolons and listed in chronological order.

Speakers rely heavily on formulaic chunks or “prefabs” during speech comprehension and production (Pawley & Syder 1983; Sinclair 1991; Erman & Warren 2000; Bybee 2006; see Wray 2002 for a broader historical review).

Surnames with internal complexity have upper or lower case according to how the author spells his/her own name, e.g.:

It has been claimed by de Swart (1998) and De Belder (2011) that meaning is compositional.

Chinese and Korean names may be treated in a special way: As the surnames are often not very distinctive, the full name may be given in the in-text citation, e.g.

the neutral negation bù is compatible with stative and activity verbs (cf. Teng Shou-hsin 1973; Hsieh Miao-Ling 2001; Lin Jo-wang 2003)

6. References

The names of authors and editors should be given in their full form as in the publication, without truncation of given names.
All author and editor names are given in the order Lastname, Firstname.
When there is more than one author (or editor), each pair of names is separated by an ampersand.
Page numbers of journals are obligatory (issue numbers preferred)
Journal titles are not abbreviated
Main title and subtitle are separated by a colon, not by a period
No author names are omitted, i.e., et al. is not used in the references.

There are four standard reference types: journal article, book, article in edited book, thesis. Works that do not fit easily into these types should be assimilated to them to the extent that this is possible.

Journal article

Johnson, Kyle & Baker, Mark & Roberts, Ian. 1989. Passive arguments raised. Linguistic Inquiry 20. 219–251.
Milewski, Tadeusz. 1951. The conception of the word in languages of North American natives. Lingua Posnaniensis 3. 248–268.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1964. Pour une sémantique diachronique structurale. Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 2(1). 139–186.

Book

Chelliah, Shobhana & de Reuse, Willem. 2010. Handbook of descriptive linguistic fieldwork. Dordrecht: Springer.
Matthews, Peter. 1974. Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lightfoot, David W. (ed.). 2002. Syntactic effects of morphological change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Article in edited volume

McCarthy, John & Prince, Alan. 1999. Prosodic morphology. In Goldsmith, John (ed.), Phonological theory: The essential readings, 238–288. Oxford: Blackwell.
Erdal, Marcel. 2007. Group inflexion, morphological ellipsis, affix suspension, clitic sharing. In Fernandez-Vest, Jocelyne (ed.), Combat pour les langues du monde: Hommage à Claude Hagège, 177–189. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Thesis

Yu, Alan C. L. 2003. The morphology and phonology of infixation. Berkeley, CA: University of California dissertation.

Surnames with internal complexity are never treated in a special way. Thus, Dutch or German surnames that begin with van or von (e.g. van Riemsdijk) or French and Dutch surnames that begin with with de (e.g. de Groot) are alphabetized under the first part, even though they begin with a lower-case letter. Thus, the following names are sorted alphabetically as indicated.

Da Milano, Federica
de Groot, Casper
De Schutter, Georges
de Saussure, Ferdinand
van der Auwera, Johan
Van Langendonck, Willy
van Riemsdijk, Henk
von Humboldt, Wilhelm

Capitalize all lexical words (title case) in journal titles and titles of book series. Capitalize only the first word (plus proper names and the first word after a colon) for book and dissertation titles, and article and chapter titles. The logic is to use title case for the titles that are recurring, lower case for those that are not.

Important note for LaTeX users: when typesetting the bibliography with the Glossa style files, titles of articles, chapters, books, and dissertation titles will automatically have their capitals made lowercase, e.g., if your bib-file has 'Passive Arguments Raised' as an article title, this will be typeset as 'Passive arguments raised' in the references list, since this is what the stylesheet wants. However, this procedure has the unwanted side-effect that words that should keep a capital also lose it, most notably the names of languages. For example, a title like 'VSO versus VOS: Aspects of Niuean word order' will appear as 'Vso versus vos: Aspects of niuean word order'. In order to avoid this from happening, you must in your bib-file protect words with necessary capitals by surrounding them with braces, like this: '{VSO} versus {VOS}: Aspects of {Niuean} word order'.

Names of book series directly follow the book title, without intervening punctuation. They appear between brackets and in roman font. They may be accompanied by an (optional) issue number.

Titles of works written in a language that readers cannot be expected to know should be accompanied by a translation, given in brackets:

Haga, Yasushi. 1998. Nihongo no shakaishinri [Social psychology in the Japanese language]. Tokyo: Ningen no Kagaku Sha.
Li, Rulong. 1999. Minnan fangyan de daici [Demonstrative and personal pronouns in Southern Min]. In Li, Rulong & Chang, Song-Hing (eds). Daici [Demonstrative and personal pronouns], 263–287. Guangzhou: Ji’nan University Press.

Glossa style in Citation Style Language (CSL) for use with Zotero is available here. Many thanks to Mark Dingemanse for creating this style, and to Lisa Levinson for updating it.

7. Typographical matters

a. Capitalization

Sentences, proper names and titles/headings/captions start with a capital letter, but there is no special capitalization (“title case”) within English titles/headings neither in the article title nor in section headings or figure captions. Capitalization is also used after the colon in titles, i.e. for the beginning of subtitles.

Capitalization is used only for parts of the article (chapters, figures, tables, appendixes) when they are numbered, e.g.:

as shown in Table 5, more details are given in Chapter 3, this is illustrated in Figure 17

b. Italics

Italics are used in the following cases:

for technical terms and all object-language forms (letters, words, phrases, sentences) that are cited within the text, unless they are phonetic transcriptions or phonological representations in IPA.
for emphasis of a particular word that is not a technical term
for words and expressions from classical languages (e.g. ad hoc, de se, hoi polloi, etc.)
for emphasis within a quotation, with the indication [emphasis mine/ours] at the end of the quotation
for the name of the language in examples.

c. Small caps

Small caps are used for the interlinear glosses in examples (e.g. fut, neg, sg, obl). They are also used for indicating stressed syllables or words in example sentences.

d. Boldface and other highlighting

Boldface can be used to draw the reader’s attention to particular aspects of a linguistic example, whether given within the text or as a numbered example. Full caps and underlining are not normally used for highlighting.

e. Quotation marks

Double quotation marks are used

when a passage from another work is cited in the text
when a technical term or other expression is mentioned that the author does not want to adopt

Ellipsis in a quotation is indicated by [...].

Single quotation marks are used exclusively for linguistic meanings, e.g.

Latin habere ‘have’ is not cognate with Old English hafian ‘have’.

Quotes within quotes are not treated in a special way.

Note that quotations from other languages should be translated (inline if they are short, in a footnote if they are longer).

f. Abbreviations

When a complex term that is not widely known is referred to frequently, it may be abbreviated (e.g., DOC for “double-object construction”). The abbreviation should be given in the text when it is first used. Abbreviations of uncommon expressions are not used in headings or captions, and they should be avoided at the beginning of a chapter or major section.

Abbreviations used in glossed examples should be listed in a separate section following the conclusions. For a list of standard abbreviations, refer to the Leipzig glossing rules.