An important part of academic writing that is distinct from non-academic writing is the practice of citation. Citations are the formulaic ways that academic authors attribute the original sources of the information, examples, and quotations in their work.

Different fields use different citation styles. Some common ones you may have encountered in the past are APA (the American Psychological Association style) or MLA (the Modern Language Association style). Because linguistics is interdisciplinary, it doesn’t really have a set style. You may find linguistics papers in either APA or MLA style, but most linguistics journals have their own style guide, which is usually similar to but more streamlined than APA. Because of this, most linguistics instructors aren’t picky about which citation style students use in their papers as long as they include all of the necessary information in a clear and consistent format.

Why is citation important?

Citation is crucial to academic writing for many reasons.

First of all, academic writing should not be done in isolation. When you do research, you do not want to start from scratch. If you can show that your ideas are related to and build on other people’s ideas, it gives your work more validity. In academic writing, you should be entering into a community of scholarship, contributing to the body of work, and combining new ideas and old ideas. Proper citation makes it clear which ideas you have taken from others to build upon and which are your own ideas.

Secondly, academic writing requires accountability to the community. As we are discovering and creating new knowledge, we are responsible to the community to be as accurate as possible. Scientific research, in particular, should be replicable, which means that others should be able to repeat our research methods and get similar results. Providing full documentation of our sources allows our colleagues to double-check our work and minimizes the chances that errors will spread.

Thirdly, not providing proper citation is dishonest. When we cite others’ research, we give them credit for the work they’ve done and show respect for their knowledge and effort.

In-text citations

In-text citations are included in the main text of a paper and indicate where each individual piece of information and quotation comes from. This allows you to show the interaction between different people’s ideas with each other and with your own ideas.

Some other fields use footnotes, but linguistics exclusively uses parenthetical citations. In-text citations indicate the author’s surname (also known as family name) and the year of publication. Each in-text citation should have a corresponding entry in the bibliography or references section.

Below you will find some examples of in-text citations, marked in bold, from Culicover (2014). Don’t worry too much about what the examples mean; pay attention to the structure of the citation!

The default way to include an in-text citation is to include the author’s surname and the year of publication in brackets after the relevant piece of information. In the following example, the original source has two authors, Pearl and Sprouse.

The author’s name is also frequently included in the structure of the sentence, in which case only the year is in parentheses.

You can also list multiple sources, as in the following example. In some style guides, they are separated by semi-colons (;), like in this example. In other style guides, they are separated by commas (,). A style guide might also instruct you to list them chronologically or alphabetically.

In-text citations should make it clear which pieces of information comes from which source, as well as which pieces of information are original to you. In the following example, you can see that the pattern was first described by Postal, and then the pattern was explained in two different papers by Wasow.

When giving a direct quote or a very specific piece of information, it is good to include the page number. The page number is indicated after the year, separated with a colon (:).

In the following example, there is a direct quote, as indicated by the quotation marks. The citation indicates that the quote is taken from page 161 of Bloomfield (1933). This example also illustrates that when you refer to the same source multiple times close together, you do not need to repeat the full in-text citation as long as it is clear which source you mean.

This final example illustrates two conventions. First of all, if there are multiple sources that give the information you are citing, you could list just a few of them as examples (the abbreviation e.g. means ‘for example,’ taken from the Latin phrase exempli gratia).

Secondly, when there are more than two or three authors, instead of listing all of the authors, you should list just the first one and include the abbreviation et al. This comes from the Latin phrase et alia which means ‘and others.’ The full bibliography entry for Fillmore et al. (1988) shows that the paper has three authors: Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and Mary Catherine O’Connor.

The references list

The purpose of the bibliography or references list is to provide full citation details for every source in the paper, giving enough information for your reader to find your sources as quickly and efficiently as possible. The bibliography is usually done in a highly formulaic way so that it can be compact, not taking a lot of space, and so that, once you know the pattern, it is very quick and easy to navigate.

When making a bibliography entry, the first thing you have to do is identify what kind of source you are dealing with. Templates for the main kinds of sources are provided below. As you look at templates here and in style guides, pay attention to capitalization, italics, and punctuation.

A book

You use the book citation style if the entire book is written by the same author. If each chapter is written by a different author, you should use the style listed below for a book chapter in an edited volume.

The template for a book is as follows:

Author’s surname, Author’s given name. Year. Title of book in italics. City of publication: Publishing company.

A book chapter in an edited volume

If a book has a collection of book chapters, each written by a separate author, you should cite the chapter you use, not the book as a whole. If you use more than one chapter, you should cite each of them separately.

The template for a book chapter in an edited volume is as follows:

Author’s surname, Author’s given name. Year. Title of book chapter. In Title of Whole Book in Italics, ed. list of editors, page numbers of chapter. City of publication: Publishing company.

In the above example, the abbreviation “ed.” stands for edited by and is used to introduce the editors.

An academic article

An academic article is a paper published in an academic journal.

The template for an academic article is as follows:

Author’s surname, Author’s given name. Year. Title of article. Title of Journal in Italics. Volume number (Issue number): Page numbers.

Not all journals use issue numbers. If you can provide it, it can be very helpful in looking up the article.

A dissertation

A dissertation is a research project completed in order to get a PhD degree, typically the length of a book.

The template for a dissertation is as folllows:

Author’s surname, Author’s given name. Year. Title of dissertation. Doctoral dissertation, Name of Institution.

General patterns in bibliography entries

Here are some general formatting patterns worth noting for bibliographies in linguistics:

• In English, we typically put the given name first and the surname last. However, if we are alphabetizing by last name, we typically reverse the order and put in a comma to indicate that the order has been reversed.

• Although many citation styles mandate only including the initial of the given name, when given the choice, many linguists opt for listing the full given name. There are several linguists with the same surname, so it is helpful!
• Unlike APA style, we do not usually put the year in parentheses.
• Titles of book chapters and articles are not in italics. Some style guides may put them in quotation marks, but we do not typically do so in linguistics.
• Titles of books and journals are in italics.
• Titles of one-time publications, including chapters, articles, and books, use sentence capitalization. This means only the first word of the title (and subtitle, if applicable) is capitalized, as well as proper names.
• Titles of repeating publications, like journals, use title capitalization. This means that all the major words of the title are capitalized.
• If the source is in a different language than the rest of the paper, it is useful to provide a translation of the source’s title in square brackets, as shown for the Jouitteau example above.

Putting it all together

Here is how to format your bibliography list as a whole:

• Each entry should have a hanging indent. A hanging indent is when the first line is not indented, but the rest of the lines are indented.
• The bibliography entries should be listed alphabetically by author’s surname.
• If there are multiple sources from the same author, those sources should be listed chronologically, as shown with the multiple sources by Chomsky.
• Very occasionally, you may find multiple sources from the same author and year. In that case, assign a letter of the alphabet (starting with ‘a’) to each one, which you put immediately after the year, as with the two papers by Barbosa in the example below. Your in-text citations should also include that letter.

Check yourself!

References and further resources

Reference materials

📑 Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique. Style guide/Protocole de rédaction. https://www-cambridge-org.uml.idm.oclc.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-linguistics-revue-canadienne-de-linguistique/style-guide-protocole-de-redaction

📑 Unified style sheet for linguistics. Wayne State University. https://clas.wayne.edu/linguistics/resources/style

Sources for examples

Culicover, Peter. 2014. The history of syntax. In The Routledge Handbook of Syntax, ed. Andrew Carnie, Dan Siddiqi, and Yosuke Sato, 465–489. London: Routledge.

Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2015. What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it? Frontiers in Psychology 6.