2. The scientific method in morphosyntax
2.7. Becoming a linguist: Citation in morphology and syntax
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.
There are Bayesian approaches, which essentially argue that a structure can be judged unacceptable if there is an alternative structure that is significantly more likely, other things being equal (Pearl and Sprouse 2013).
Culicover (2014: 486)
The author’s name is also frequently included in the structure of the sentence, in which case only the year is in parentheses.
The distinction between grammaticality and acceptability was highlighted by Miller and Chomsky (1963), who observed that a sentence can be well-formed in the sense that it follows the rules of linear ordering, phrase structure, and morphological form, but is nevertheless unacceptable.
Culicover (2014: 466)
When should you incorporate the authors into your sentence and when should they be in parentheses? Most of the time, they should be included in parentheses. You want the source to fade into the background, and have the focus be on the information you’re sharing. However, sometimes who said the information is important, for example if they were the first person to come up with a certain idea or if you’re comparing their ideas with someone else’s. In that case, it makes sense to incorporate the author into the sentence structure to give them more prominence.
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.
The unacceptability of center embedding has been generally attributed to processing complexity and not to grammar (Gibson 1998; Lewis 1997).
Culicover (2014: 466)
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.
Wasow (1972; 1979) proposed traces as a way to solve a puzzling binding fact noted by Postal (1971).
Culicover (2014: 475)
If a whole paragraph or chunk of your paper is from the same source, you don’t need to repeat the in-text citation after every sentence, as long as it’s clear that the whole section comes from the same source. Citations need to show up more frequently when you’re incorporating information from many different sources. That being said, synthesizing ideas from many different sources shows an advanced understanding of the subject matter and critical thinking and is something that you should strive for in assignments involving research.
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 view has its direct antecedents in the theory of immediate constituents (IC), in which the function of syntax is to mediate between the observed form of a sentence and its meaning: “we could not understand the form of a language if we merely reduced all the complex forms to their ultimate constituents” (Bloomfield 1933: 161). Bloomfield argues that in order to account for the meaning of a sentence, it is necessary to recognize how individual constituents (e.g., words and morphemes), constitute more complex forms, which themselves constitute more complex forms.
Culicover (2014: 467)
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.
Such a view has been explicitly formalized in Construction Grammar (Kay 2002), and has been widely adopted (see, e.g., Fillmore et al. 1988; Kay and Fillmore 1999; Goldberg 1995; 2006; Culicover and Jackendoff 2005; Sag 2012).
Culicover (2014: 485)
Common abbreviations in in-text citations
There are many abbreviations that may be used in in-text citations.
- a.o. for among others.
Use: If you consulted many, many sources that say something similar, you can list just a few, with a.o. on the end.
Example: Syntax textbooks in the generative tradition often use many tree diagrams (Adger 2003, Carnie 2020, Cowper 1992, Larson 2009, a.o.). - cf. from the Latin confer ‘compare’.
Use: If you want to list several sources that are relevant to what you just wrote but say slightly different things (maybe you agree with them, maybe you don’t, but they’re worth looking at), you can introduce the citation with c.f.
Example: There are many arguments for and against the theory of Universal Grammar (cf. Boxell 2016, Dąbrowska 2015). - e.g. from the latin exempli gratia ‘for example’.
Use: If there are multiple sources that say the same or similar things, and you just want to list one or a few of them.
Example: Syntax textbooks in the generative tradition often use many tree diagrams (e.g., Carnie 2020). - et al. from the Latin et alia meaning ‘and others’.
Use: If your source has more than 2-3 authors, use et al. instead of listing them all. Some style guides will have specific instructions for how many authors to list and when to use et al.
Example: Charity Hudley et al. (2024) has advanced the discussion on justice in linguistics research. - n.d. for ‘no date’.
Use: If your example does not have a date indicated. Be careful! If there is no date listed, then that is a clue that your source is not an academic source. On the other hand, sometimes my students cite something as n.d. when the date is available on the source, just tricky to find.
Example: Most languages spoken in Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. One notable example is Basque, a language with no known living relatives (Etxepare Euskala Institutua, n.d.). - p.c. from ‘personal communication.’
Use: If you are giving credit to someone who told you directly (not in a published format) the information you are citing, you should give them credit with p.c. For example, if a classmate gives you an idea that you use in your assignment, you could give them credit with a p.c. citation. This can be used when the information was told to you directly in person, over email, over text, etc. You can also use p.c. if a linguist shares data with you that they had collected but not yet published.
Example: The language Niuean has verb-initial word order (Diane Massam, p.c.). - sic from the Latin ‘thus, so’.
Use: If you’re quoting something with an error in it, use sic to indicate that the error comes from the original text.
Example: “There are several subsystems at work in [sic] when we use language” (Carnie 2021: 4).
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.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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.
Cardinaletti, Anna. 2004. Towards a cartography of subject positions. In The structure of CP and IP, ed. Luigi Rizzi, 124–174. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2008. On phases. In Foundational issues in linguistic theory: Essays in honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, ed. Robert Freidin, Carlos P. Otero, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, 133–166. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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.
Barbosa, Pilar. 2011. Pro-drop and theories of pro in the Minimalist Program Part 1: Consistent null subject languages and the Pronominal-Agr Hypothesis. Language and Linguistics Compass 5 (8): 551–570.
Lillo-Martin, Diane. 1986. Two kinds of null arguments in American Sign Language. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 4: 415–444.
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.
Jouitteau, Mélanie. 2005. La syntaxe comparée du breton [Comparative syntax of Breton]. Doctoral dissertation, Université de Nantes.
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.
My given name is Julianne. This is the name my parents assigned to me when I was born. My surname is Doner. This is the name that was passed on to me from my parents and that I share with my siblings and parents. I typically write my name as “Julianne Doner.” But if I am alphabetizing by last name, I would list it as “Doner, Julianne” with a comma.
- 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.
Barbosa, Pilar. 2011a. Pro-drop and theories of pro in the Minimalist Program Part 1: Consistent null subject languages and the Pronominal-Agr Hypothesis. Language and Linguistics Compass 5 (8): 551–570.
Barbosa, Pilar. 2011b. Pro-drop and theories of pro in the Minimalist Program Part 2: Pronoun deletion analyses of null subjects and partial, discourse, and semi pro-drop. Language and Linguistics Compass 5 (8): 571–587.
Chomsky, Noam. 1982. Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2008. On phases. In Foundational issues in linguistic theory: Essays in honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, ed. Robert Freidin, Carlos P. Otero, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, 133–166. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jouitteau, Mélanie. 2005. La syntaxe comparée du breton [Comparative syntax of Breton]. Doctoral dissertation, Université de Nantes.
Lillo-Martin, Diane. 1986. Two kinds of null arguments in American Sign Language. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 4: 415–444.
Schuit, Joke, Anne Baker, and Roland Pfau. 2011. Inuit Sign Language: A contribution to sign language typology. Linguistics in Amsterdam (ACLC Working Papers) 4.
Key takeaways
- Citations are a formalized way to give credit to the sources of your work and should be used in all academic writing.
- Each piece of information that you get from another source should be followed by an in-text citation that lists the author’s surname and the year of the source in parentheses.
- Academic papers should have a references section at the end of the paper that lists the full bibliographic information for all of its sources, detailed enough so that anyone else should be able to find the same sources. Each in-text citation in your paper should have a corresponding entry in the references list.
- The field of linguistics doesn’t have a single standardized citation format. Most linguistics professors don’t care which format you use, as long as you are internally consistent and include all of the relevant information. In this section, we looked at the citation guidelines from the Canadian Journal of Linguistics.
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.
The attribution of quotes and information to their original sources.
Research that can be repeated in different contexts with similar results.
