Submissions

Submitting an Article Online

To submit an article online, and to check the status of your submission, you need to have an account with Glossa: a journal of general linguistics

Don't have an account? Register Here.

Start Submission

Author Guidelines

Submission information | Article types | Structure | Style sheet |

Submission information

Submissions should be made electronically through this website.

Prior to submission, please 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.

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Research articles must describe the outcomes and application of unpublished original research.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 tabulated data. Research articles should be no more than 15,000 words in length. Longer articles will have to be properly justified by the authors.
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 should be no more than 15,000 words in length. Again, longer articles will have to be properly justified by the authors.
Book reviews present critical appraisals of recent books in linguistics, with a preference for monographs, handbooks, and grammars. can cover topics such as current controversies or the historical development of studies as well as issues of regional or temporal focus. Papers should critically engage with the relevant body of extant literature. Book reviews should be no longer than 3,000 words in length.
Review articles present longer critical appraisals of one or more recent books containing 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 longer 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 without the need for a developed analysis or solution.

Special Collections are papers devoted to a particular topic, and edited by a team of guest editors. Although contributions to special collections are subject to the normal process of blind peer review, Special Collections are by invitation only. Upon publication, papers within a special collection will be assigned to one of the above article types and collated within their own special collection page. If you are interested in submitting or guest-editing a Special Collection, please contact the editors.

All word limits include referencing and citation.

Structure

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

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).

Main text
The body of the submission should be structured in a logical and easy to follow manner. The text must follow the instructions as per the journal's Style sheet.

Abbreviations
Provide explanation of abbreviations used in the manuscript.

Supplementary Files (optional)
Any supplementary/additional files that should link to the main publication must be listed, with a corresponding number, title and option description. Ideally supplementary files are also cited in the main text. If the supplementary file has been uploaded to an open repository then please also include the DOI. If the files are not in a repository please upload all relevant files as 'Data' files during the submission process. The journal will host the files and assign a DOI upon publication.

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

Ethics and consent (if applicable)
See 'Ethics and consent' section below for details on what should be declared.

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

Funding Information (optional)
Should the research have received a funding grant then the grant provider and grant number should be detailed.

Competing interests
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.

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

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 (http://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistics/past-research-resources/resources/generic-style-rules.html). It was slightly adapted for Glossa by Waltraud Paul and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd in November 2015.

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 as long as it is under review.

Articles are preceded by an abstract of 100–300 words and about five 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 (optional) unnumbered sections: 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. Consult the Glossa website for more information. 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: http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php). 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.

1. (1)
1. a.

1. Ich
2. I.nom
1. kenne
2. know
1. das Kind,
2. the child.acc
1. dem
2. who.dat
1. du
2. you.nom
1. geholfen
2. helped
1. hast.
2. have

1. ‘I know the child that you helped.’

1. b.

1. Ich
2. I.nom
1. kenne
2. know
1. das Kind,
2. the child.acc
1. dem
2. who.dat
1. du
2. you.nom
1. nicht
2. neg
1. geholfen
2. helped
1. hast.
2. have

1. ‘I know the child that you didn't help.’

When the example is not a complete sentence, there is no capitalization and no full stop at the end. If the name of the language is added, the source of the example, or any extra information, this information must be added on an extra first line of the example (with the name of the language in italics).¹

1. (2)

1. German

das Kind,
the child.nom

1. dem
2. who.dat
1. du
2. you.nom
1. geholfen
2. helped
1. hast
2. have

1. ‘the child that you helped’

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

The use of any nonstandard layout in examples beyond what is illustrated above is strongly discouraged, as this will increase production time (and cost) of your paper. If you feel an example needs additional explanation, try as much as possible to provide this in the text that goes with the example.

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 anymore 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 figures, but above tables, with only 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 the 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 first surname plus et al. can be used.

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.

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.

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.

Glossa style in CSL is available at: https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=Glossa
Many thanks to Mark Dingemanse for creating this style.

Journal article

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

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

Erdal, Marcel. 2007. Group inflexion, morphological ellipsis, affix suspension, clitic sharing. In Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest (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: University of California dissertation.

Author surnames and given names

All author names are given in the order Firstname Lastname, 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 Lastname, Firstname.

McCarthy, John & Alan Prince. 1999. Prosodic morphology. In John Goldsmith (ed.), Phonological theory: The essential readings, 238–288. Oxford: Blackwell.

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. No author name is omitted, i.e. et al. is not used in references.

Chelliah, Shobhana & Willem de Reuse. 2010. Handbook of descriptive linguistic fieldwork. Dordrecht: Springer.

Johnson, Kyle, Mark Baker & Ian Roberts. 1989. Passive arguments raised. Linguistic Inquiry 20. 219–251.

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.

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.

Internet publications

Regular publications that are available online are not treated in a special way, as this applies to more and more publications anyway. When citing a web resource that is not a regular scientific publication, this should be treated like a book, to the extent that this is possible, e.g.

Native Languages of the Americas. 1998–2014. Vocabulary in Native American languages: Salish words.(http://www.native-languages.org/salish_words.htm) (Accessed 2014-12-02.)

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.

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 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.

8. Ethics and consent

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and the authors should include a statement within the article text detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval. The identity of the research subject should be anonymised whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian).

¹ Examples in footnotes are numbered with lower case Roman numerals enclosed between brackets:

(i) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

More text can follow the example.

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

The submission has not been previously published, nor is it being considered for publication by another journal (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal.
All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the authorship guidelines.
The submission is provided as a single PDF file, containing all tables and figures
All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
Tables and figures are all provided in the submitted PDF and correctly cited in the text.
Figures/images have a resolution of at least 300dpi and are included in the main manuscript file being submitted.
The author(s) agree to edit their text to adhere to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, should the paper be editorially accepted.
All references to the author(s) have been removed from the paper. Aside from omitting the author’s name, this entails only referring to your own work in the third person (do not use ‘Author 1’ or a similar replacement for your own name), and removing your name and any additional metadata from the document’s properties.
Author names are removed from the manuscript files (following the instructions to ensure blind peer review).

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party. The full privacy policy can be viewed here.

Publication Fees

Authors publishing in Glossa face no financial charges for the publication of their article. Those authors who have access to funds earmarked for Article Processing Charges (via a research grant or through their institution) will be asked to use those funds to cover the £330 APC of their publication in Glossa. Authors without access to such funds must contact tim.wakeford@ubiquitypress.com to confirm that they will require the APC to be waived. The waived APCs will be paid by LingOA, a fund made possible by grants from the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), with long-term funding provided by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH).

The APC covers all publication costs (editorial processes; web hosting; indexing; marketing; archiving; DOI registration etc) and ensures that all of the content is fully open access. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and allows the journal to be run in a sustainable way.

If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators and institution library, as funds may be available to you.

Shortly after publication, authors that have not already requested a waiver from LingOA will receive an APC request email along with information on how payment can be arranged. If the APC situation has changed since submission to publication, an APC waiver can also be requested at this point.

Waiver Information

Authors without access to such funds must contact tim.wakeford@ubiquitypress.com to confirm that they will require the APC to be waived. The waived APCs for their articles will be paid by LingOA, a fund made possible by grants from the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), with long-term funding provided by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH).

Quick links