Submission information | Article types | Structure | Permissions | Style sheet |
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.
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.
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.
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.
The conclusion is the last numbered section. It may be followed by several unnumbered sections, in this order:
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.
The journal requires authors to make all data associated with their submission openly available, according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). More information can be found on the Journal Policies page.
If data/supplementary files are to be associated with the submission, one of the below options should be followed:
1) upload the files to your chosen open repository and make note of the DOI that they will provide (most suitable for datasets or information that act as foundations to the research being published. This option makes the files more findable and more citable). We recommend an open repository such as osf.io, 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 page on OSF, to direct interested readers to the supplementary materials. 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 may be found here. If you'd like to learn more about best practices for ensuring reproducibility, see Laurinavichyute and Vasishth (2021). Please contact us if you would like more information or advice about hosting your data on an open repository.
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 that provides a title and very short summary of the files for 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
When multiple citations are listed, they are separated by semicolons and listed in chronological order.
Surnames with internal complexity have upper or lower case according to how the author spells his/her own name, e.g.:
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.
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.
All author names are given in the order Lastname, Firstname.
When there are more than two authors (or editors), each pair of names is separated by an ampersand. No author name is omitted, i.e. et al. is not used in the list of references.
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.
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.
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.
Titles of works written in a language that readers cannot be expected to know should be accompanied by a translation, given in brackets:
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.
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.:
b. Italics
Italics are used in the following cases:
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
Ellipsis in a quotation is indicated by [...].
Single quotation marks are used exclusively for linguistic meanings, e.g.
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.
Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and the authors should include a statement in the article text detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval, or mention any exemptions to ethical approval that apply to their research. The identity of research subjects 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.