Citing sources in your discussion
In linguistics publications and presentations, citations to sources typically follow the Lastname[s] (Year) format. Do not use footnotes that contain only citations (as in MLA format). Do not give only the author's name or only the page number. Do not write out the whole title of a paper or book. Use Lastname[s] (Year), or Lastname[s] (Year: Page#) for a specific page-number citation.
Note the use of parentheses in these two different situations:
- When the names of the authors are part of the sentence you are writing:
Prince & Smolensky (1993) originally proposed faithfulness constraints known as Parse and Fill. - When you cite the work as a source of an idea or claim, but the author names are not part of
your sentence itself:
The faithfulness constraints Parse and Fill (Prince & Smolensky 1993) assess only output forms.
Multiple authors (or editors)
When a work has multiple authors, cite them in the text as:
- LastName1 & LastName2 (Year) | for two authors
- LastName1, LastName2, & LastName3 (Year) --or-- LastName1 et al. (Year) | for three or more authors
- LastName1, FirstName1, & FirstName2 LastName2. Year. [...]
- LastName1, FirstName1, FirstName2 LastName2, & FirstName3 LastName3. Year. [...]
Formatting references in your bibliography
A list of references at the end of a paper or assignment should have the header References or Bibliography, not Works Cited.
Bibliographies in linguistics papers tend to follow something similar to APA format, but it is useful to give the authors' whole first names, unlike APA which only shows initials. This page provides some examples that you can follow, based on the Unified Linguistics Style Sheet.
Your most commonly cited sources will probably be in the following categories. (See above for multiple authors.)
- Journal article
Lastname, Firstname. Year. The title of the article. Journal Title Volume# (Issue#--optional): page#-page#.
Davidson, Lisa. 2010. Phonetic bases of similarities in cross-language production: Evidence from English and Catalan. Journal of Phonetics 38: 272-288.
- Conference proceedings
- Strictly speaking, whether to treat these like a journal article or a book chapter depends on whether the proceedings volume has an ISSN or an ISBN, but for my courses you may treat them all like a journal article for simplicity.
Lastname, Firstname. Year. The title of the conference paper. Proceedings Title Conference# [or Year#]: page#-page#.
Kochetov, Alexei. 2003. Positional markedness as a by-product of the learning situation. Berkeley Linguistics Society 29 (1): 545-556.
- Book chapter in an edited volume
- Note that when each chapter in a book has different authors, it is important to cite the specific chapter that is your reference, not the whole book, unless you are literally using the whole book as your source.
Lastname, Firstname. Year. The title of the chapter. In EditorFirstname Lastname (ed.), Book title, page#-page#. City: Publisher.
Steriade, Donca. 2001. Directional asymmetries in place assimilation: A perceptual account. In Elizabeth V. Hume & Keith Johnson (eds.), The role of speech perception in phonology, 219-250. San Diego: Academic Press.
- For examples of citation format for other kinds of sources, see the Unified Linguistics Style Sheet.
Bibliography entries for electronic sources
Different publications have different standards concerning bibliography entries for material accessed online. Here are my suggestions:
- If you are citing a journal article, book chapter, or conference proceedings paper that
you have accessed online, use the same format as above for a print source, but add a link at the end
(DOI is preferred when available).
- If you are citing another kind of online resource, provide author, date, and other identifying information as clearly as you can, and include a link to the resource. For more information, see the Unified Linguistics Style Sheet.