Submissions

Author Guidelines

The Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus (SPiL Plus) style sheet is based on The Generic Style Rules for Linguistics (December 2014 version), developed under a CC-BY license by Martin Haspelmath, and the SU Department of General Linguistics’ in-house style guide.

A downloadable version of the author guidelines is available here.

Submissions

Submissions should be made electronically through this website. Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript. Failure to do so may delay the processing of your submission.

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.

Article types

Research articles

Research articles must describe the outcomes and application of unpublished original research.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 tabulated data. Research articles are subject to double blind peer review.

Research notes

Research notes are not subject to blind peer review but are assessed by the (guest) editors for inclusion in an ordinary or special issue. Research notes are typically brief descriptions of ongoing research and are in general by invitation only.

Review articles

Review articles present longer critical appraisals of one or more recent books and contain an original contribution or perspective on the book(s) reviewed. They may also describe the state-of-the art in a given sub-discipline or a specific topic in linguistics. Review articles will be reviewed by the editors and/or members of the editorial board.

Akkers ('Acorns') or Squibs

Squibs are brief, self-contained and explicit notes which call attention to a theoretically unexpected observation about language without the need for a developed analysis or solution. They are none-the-less subject to blind peer review. The term “squib” was coined by Prof Háj Ross, one of the first editors of Linguistic Inquiry, who defines them as follows:

                                                                                                        (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/haj/Squibnet/)

In a nod to the heritage of Stellenbosch University as the heart of the Eikestad ‘oak city’ in the Cape Winelands of South Africa, squibs are affectionately termed Akkers ‘acorns’. Manuscripts accepted as Akkers will not be required to propose a solution to problems they address as long as their relevance to theoretical issues is made clear. Akkers are subject to double blind peer review.

Make a new submission to the Akkers ('Acorns') section.

Special issues

Special issues are collections of papers devoted to a particular topic and edited by a (team of) guest editor(s). Although contributions to special issues are subject to the normal process of blind peer review, submissions are typically by invitation only. If you are interested in submitting or guest editing a special issue, please contact the editors.

Style Sheet

• Font, margins, spacing

Body of the text is presented in single spacing, 12-point Times New Roman (with no additional space before or after paragraphs or headings). Single lines are left open between paragraphs and between indented quotations (longer than three lines). Paragraphs must be justified, with no indentation of the first line. Margins are custom, 30 mm top and bottom, 25 mm left and right. Paper size is A4, and header and footer are 12.5 mm. Do not leave any track changes, comments or highlighting in the document. Add automated page numbers.

• Capitalization, small caps, boldface, italics

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 (figures, tables, appendixes) when they are numbered. Please refrain from the use of FULL CAPS (except for abbreviations). Small caps are used for grammatical categories in the interlinear glosses in examples (e.g. FUT, NEG, SG, OBL, etc.) and for glossing sign languages. 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. Italics are used (i) for non-English text and linguistic material (i.e. sentences, phrases, words, morphemes, sounds) presented as part of a statement in the text, unless they are phonetic transcriptions or phonological representations in IPA, (ii) for technical terms, (iii) for emphasis of a particular word that is not a technical term, and (iv) for emphasis within a quotation, with the indication [emphasis mine/ours] at the end of the quotation.

• Spelling conventions

SPiL plus follows the Oxford spelling conventions. This entails using -ize (and -ization) instead of -ise (and -isation). This use of z instead of s does not apply, however, to words ending in -yse, such as analyse, which are written with an s. In all other cases, the Oxford spelling standard follows the British or South African spelling standard (e.g. centre, enrol/enrolment, programme, colour, etc.)

• Title

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. Affiliations need to include: the Unit (where applicable), Department/School, University, City (unless indicated in the name of the University) and Country. To ensure blin peer review, please only list the title and abstract on the submitted manuscript.

• Abstract and keywords

Articles must have the main text prefaced by an abstract of no more than 300 words summarising the main arguments and conclusions of the article. A list of up to six key words must be placed below the abstract. 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. If the article is in a language other than English, an English translation of the abstract must accompany the manuscript (for certain special issues an extended English abstract of 1500 words may be required).

• Headings

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 capitalization. More than three levels of subsections should only be used in special circumstances. If a (sub-)section has (sub-)subsections, there must be minimally two of them, and they must be exhaustive. This means that all text in a chapter must belong to some section, all text within a section must belong to some subsection, and so on. A short introductory paragraph is allowed by way of exception.

• Numbered examples

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. When there are multiple examples (“sub-examples”) under a single number, they are distinguished by the letters a, b, etc. The text of numbered examples is normally in italics, just like the text of in-line examples, unless the example is not glossed and translated (i.e. in English works, when it is from English).

In numbered examples, do not use italics to highlight particular parts of the example; use bold instead. Linguistic material (i.e. sentences, phrases, words, morphemes, sounds) presented as part of a statement in the text must be italicized. Such material must not be enclosed in inverted commas.

When multiple languages are mentioned in a single text, the name of the language may be given to the right of the example, as in (3), or in the line next to the example number, as in (4). Sources of numbered examples are standardly given directly after the idiomatic translation. When the source is not a bibliographical reference but is the name of a text or corpus (perhaps unpublished), the source is given in square brackets and the article must contain a special section at the end where more information about the sources is given. Ungrammatical examples can be given a parenthesized idiomatic translation. A literal translation may be given in parentheses after the idiomatic translation.

• 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. For this reason, 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; rather, refer to tables and figures as “Table 2” or “Figure 4”.

Tables and figures are numbered consecutively (i.e., Table 1, Table 2.1, Table 2.2, Figure 1, Figure 2) and have their own captions. The caption is placed below figures, but above tables, with only the figure or table number in bold. The caption ends in a full stop. Tree diagrams should be treated as examples, not as figures. Consider Table 2 and Figure 4.

• 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. If the surname is used in the sentence, only the year and page number are included in parentheses. Separate authors with “and” and not “&” when surnames are used in the sentence.

If the surname is not mentioned in the sentence, it is included in the parentheses along with the year and page number (if applicable). The ampersand “&” is used when citing a reference with two authors fully parenthetically.

If there are more than two authors, the first reference to the co-authored work includes the names of all the authors. Subsequent reference to the co-authored work gives the name of the first author mentioned, followed by “et al.” (not italicized).

When multiple citations are listed in parentheses, they are separated by semicolons and listed in chronological order. When multiple works by the same author are cited, the author’s name need not be repeated, and the years are separated by commas. Surnames with internal complexity have upper or lower case according to how the author spells his/her own name. 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.

• Quotations and quotation marks

Double quotation marks are used when a passage (three lines or less) from another work is cited in the text.

To indicate that (a) word(s) have been omitted from within a quoted passage, three dots are inserted in the place of the missing words.

To indicate that a word is inserted or modified from the original for clarity, i.e., uncapitalized, use square brackets:

Quotation marks are also used to indicate that a word is being used in a particular sense or when a technical term or other expression is mentioned that the author does not want to adopt. In the case of words depicting concepts, single inverted commas are used. In the case of words used as (technical) terms, or words representing the meaning of other words, double inverted commas are used.

• Use of footnotes/endnotes

Use footnotes rather than endnotes.¹ These will appear at the bottom of each page. Footnotes 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. ²

• 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.

• Appendices and other optional sections

The conclusion is the last numbered section. It may be followed by several (optional) unnumbered sections: Abbreviations, Ethics and consent, Funding information, Competing interests, Authors’ contributions and Acknowledgements. The list of bibliographical references (References) follows these optional sections. Appendices follow the references and are numbered using capital letters beginning at Appendix A. The appendix itself must have a descriptive heading. Appendices are used only for presenting linguistic data, linguistic transcripts, tables and figures, and other supplementary documents that cannot be incorporated in the text in a natural way.

• References

Bibliographic entries are presented as a single alphabetical list and are not numbered. The references should be left-aligned. The formatting of an entry in a bibliography is determined by the nature of the source. There are four standard reference types: book, chapter in edited book, journal article, thesis. Works that do not fit easily into these types should be assimilated to them to the extent that this is possible. DOIs for all references, where available, should be provided. This can be done using the Crossref Metadata Search.

1. Author names

The names of authors and editors should preferably be given in their full form as in the publication, without truncation of given names. All author names are given in the order First name Last name, except for the first author of a bibliography item whose name serves to place the item in the alphabetical order. In this case, the order is Last name, First name.

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 Saussure) are alphabetized under the first part, even though they begin with a lower-case letter.

No author names are omitted, i.e. et al. is not used in the references. When there are more than two authors (or editors), each pair of names is separated by a comma, except the last two, which are separated by an ampersand.

• Titles in references

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.

Titles of books, journals, and larger works should be italicized, while titles of chapters, articles, and theses/dissertations are not italicized. Main title and subtitle are separated by a colon, not by a period. Journal titles are not abbreviated. Titles of works written in a language that readers cannot be expected to know should be accompanied by a translation, given in square brackets.

• Books/chapters in edited volume

An entry for an entire book or edited volume is structured as follows:

Lastname, First name. Year. Title in italics: Subtitle. Place: Publisher.

An entry for a book chapter is structured as follows:

Surname, First name. Year. Chapter title not italicized. In First Editor & Second Editor (eds.). Title of larger volume in italics, page-page. Place: Publisher.

• Journal articles

Page numbers of journals are obligatory (issue numbers preferred). Journal titles may not be abbreviated. The structure of journal article entries is as follows:

Surname, First name & First name Surname. Year. Article title: Not italicized. Journal Title volume(issue): page-page. DOI

• Thesis/dissertation

Theses and dissertations are structured as follows:

Surname, First name. Year. Title italicized. Thesis type, Institution.

• Documents obtained online

Regular publications that are available online are not treated in a special way. For sources obtained through the internet, that are not regular scientific publications, this should be treated like a book, to the extent that this is possible. References must follow the following structure:

Surname, Initial(s). Year of last update ([and if available] day and month). Title of document. Online: Full address of the site, including full path leading to document (date accessed)

• Titles in unfamiliar languages

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