Before submitting your paper, please make sure to remove any mention of your name(s) from the text and make your document anonymous by following the instructions described HERE. All information about author(s), including the bionote(s), should be provided in the submission form, not in the submitted text.

CITATIONS AND REFERENCES

Linguaculture uses the MLA Style Guide for citations and bibliography formatting (9th edition, please consult the online guide available HERE). Manuscripts containing special fonts or characters should be submitted as both .docx and .pdf files. Texts composed in English by non-native speakers should be examined by a native speaker before being submitted.

FORMATTING

Download this TEXT TEMPLATE to format your contribution. The paper should be formatted according to the following guidelines:

    • Title of the article: Times New Roman 14, capital letters
    • Abstract: Times New Roman 10
    • Keywords: Times New Roman 10, italics, five or more
    • Text body: Times New Roman 11, single-spaced, except for block quotes and footnotes, which should be written in Times New Roman, 10
    • Works Cited: Times New Roman, 10, all but first line hanging

Sections may or may not have headings. Headings begin flush left, using headline-style capitalization. The first paragraph after a heading or an unheaded section break is not indented.
Contributions should count at least 5,000 words but not exceed 7,000 words including footnotes and the 'Works Cited' section.

Please do not insert page numbers and do not format text using tabs and multiple blank spaces.

Book reviews and book notes should conform to the guidelines specified above. The information on the author and the book reviewed should be given as follows:

  • Name of author(s)/editor(s). Title of book. Place: Publishing House. Year. No. of pages. ISBN. Price.

When submitting a book review, please choose the appropriate journal section (Book Reviewes and Notes) in the submission form.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS

Running text

The first line of each new paragraph should be indented, except where it follows a heading. There should be no space between paragraphs.

Use the em dash (—) without any space before or after it to mark a break within a continuing sentence.

Headings

Please type all headings—chapter titles, main and sub-headings—with capital letters. Leave additional spacing above and below section headings and above and below indented quotes.

In-text citations

Accuracy of all reference data is the responsibility of the author. Quotes must reproduce the wording, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of the original exactly. The following situations may constitute exceptions from this rule:

  1. A change in capitalization at the beginning of a quote may be made, without being signalled through the use of brackets, if the quote’s syntactic relationship to the preceding text suggests Changes in capitalization within a quote must be bracketed.
  2. The terminal punctuation may be omitted or changed to a comma if necessary, and internal punctuation before or after ellipsis points may be
  3. Notes and their superscript callouts from the original are
  4. Obvious typographical errors (e.g., “the”) may be corrected, but idiosyncratic spellings found in older works must be Spellings that are likely to be thought incorrect may be followed by sic in brackets.

Prose quotes that are at least four lines in length are set off from the text as block quotes. The first line is not indented (see examples of block quotes in the Text template above).

Example:
In other words,

McCarthy’s Westerns employ elements of the tradition: cowboys, an American West heavily influenced by Hispanic culture, ranches, Indians, the frontier, settlers, cavalry, the gunfighter, and what happens when all of these things collide. For McCarthy the collision unveils a loss of innocence for the young and old male protagonists. (…) he works against convention by ensuring that, ultimately, all of his main characters fail or only partially succeed in their ambitions. (Greenwood 22)

Verse quotes of one line or two lines are run into the text. Verse quotes of more than two lines are set off from the text, and omitted lines are indicated with a line of dots approximately equal in length to the preceding line:

Example:
solid but airy; fresh as if just finished
and taken off the frame.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps

Quotes of dramatic dialogue include the characters’ names, followed by a colon and they too are set off from the text.

Example:
William: But how did you know I was here?
Andrew: Are you kidding? Who else would drive a car like that?
William: How would you drive it?

If the play is written in verse, like a Shakespeare play, the part of the play (act, scene, canto) followed by the line numbers should be given in the reference, all in Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) separated by periods. Line breaks should be marked by a slash. For more than three lines, blocked quotes are appropriate.

Example:
After witnessing Hamlet leave with the ghost, Marcellus observes, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.1.90). The ghost then addresses Hamlet:
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away. (1.5.10‐13)

Quotation marks

Double quotation marks should be used throughout, with single quotation marks used for a quote within another quote. Commas and periods go inside the closing quotation marks, unless there is a parenthetical reference following, in which case the required punctuation should be placed after it.

Example:
Greenwood sees them as “one of the primary modes through which McCarthy expresses this distinctive vision of the American cultural experience” (15).

Other punctuation marks (semicolons, colons, question marks, exclamation points) go outside the closing quote marks unless they are part of the quoted text.

Example:
“He is such a lovely person!” she exclaimed.
Why did the lawyer say “I need more time to prepare for this”?

Full stops, commas, colons and semi-colons should be followed by only one character space, not two.

Footnotes

Within the text, numbers indicating footnotes should come after any punctuation marks. The footnotes themselves should appear at the bottom of the page in Times New Roman, 10. Footnotes may contain material that cannot be conveniently included in the text, such as explanatory comments or additional bibliographic information.

Abbreviations

Commonly used abbreviations include cf., chap. (chaps.), ed. (eds.), e.g., esp., et al. (used of people), etc. (used of things), fol. (fols.), i.e., introd., l. (ll.), lit. (“literally”), n. (nn.), pt. (pts.), repr., sec. (secs.), ser., s.v., vol. (vols.). If the cited source does not have a date, publisher or pagination, the following abbreviations must be used: n. pag. for sources without page numbers, n.d. for no date, and N.p. if name of the publisher is omitted.