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Research articles must describe the outcomes and application of unpublished original research.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 auth