Guidelines for authors

General

PSiCL carries original articles with a theoretical impact on any area of linguistics, discussion papers and reply articles, as well as review articles and reviews.

The language of the journal is English.

Papers submitted to PSiCL must stricly follow the guidelines below, as well as our reference stylesheet.

The optimum submission length is 6000-7000 words (excluding references). In exceptional situations, shorter submissions may be accepted as "reports". Review articles and reviews should aim at a length of 1500-3000 words.

All submissions will be subject to a fully anonymous peer-reviewing procedure.

Electronic submission

All papers must be submitted in an electronic format. We accept Microsoft Word files, as well as files created using the OpenOffice suite. If you cannot produce any of the two formats, pdf (Adobe Acrobat) or txt (plain text) are also acceptable.

For submissions in formats other than pdf, a pdf file will be generated to serve as a virtual reference printout. This will be immediately returned to the author for inspection. If problems are found at this stage, we will require a hard copy (printout) to be submitted in duplicate in addition to the electronic version.

Layout

The first page should contain the title of the submission, full names of all the authors, and full contact details. (Please note that the first author's email address will appear in the final published version of the article.)

Also, a running head of no more than 50 characters (including spaces) should be provided. This will appear in the right-hand page headers in the published paper.

Page 2 should contain the title (but not the name(s) of the author(s)), an abstract of 150-200 words, and up to 5 keywords.

The body of the paper should start on page 3. All pages must be double-spaced and numbered consecutively.

All sections must be numbered consecutively up to the third level (e.g. 2.1.1). Wherever possible, use the section numbers for cross-referencing within the article.

Please avoid excessive use of notes. Use footnotes rather than endnotes.

Formatting

Important: formatting should be kept to an absolute minimum. Most formatting will be removed/changed when processing the submission. In particular, custom styles for page numbers, footnotes, page headers, section titles, as well as automatic numbering etc. must be avoided wherever possible. Please do not use automatic word hyphenation.

It is acceptable to use bold face, italics, underlining, small capitals, superscript and subscript.

If you are comfortable using a document template, we suggest downloading our simple template from here.

Fonts

Non-standard fonts must be avoided.

If you need to include special characters (phonetic symbols in particular), we strongly recommend the Doulos SIL font available free of charge from here. If the use of a custom font is essential, check that you will be able to make the font file available to us. (Note that there may be restrictions for commercial fonts.) If this is not possible, we will request a hard copy of the paper to be submitted.

Figures and images

All figures must be numbered consecutively and supplied with captions.

Figures must not be included in the body text. Each figure should placed on a separate page at the end of the article, after the References section. Its location in the body of the article should be indicated with the following text: [place figure x about here]. Please contact the editing team about the acceptable image formats.

Linguistic examples

All linguistic exmaples must be numbered consecutively throughout the paper, using parenthesised Arabic numerals (e.g. (3)). Please do not use automatic numbering.

Examples in the body text should be set in italics. Examples from languages other than English should be provided with an English gloss in single quotation marks (e.g. menedżer 'manager').

If a word-for-word gloss is needed for a longer example, we strongly recommend using a table or aligning the words using tabs. Do not use spaces to align words. You may download an example from here.

References

(You may also use our sample papers to familiarise yourself with our refenrece system.)

All sources referred to in the body text must appear in a References section at the end of the article. The section must not contain any sources not referred to in the text. Please verify that the names and dates match exaclty. Note the use of punctuation marks.

Reference format examples: Body text

According to Gibbon (2005: 450)...

This process is not new (Collins and Mees 1996; Fabricius 2002).

This is discussed by many sources (e.g. Ashby and Maidment 2005: 119; Ladefoged 2001: 55-56).

Knight et al. (2000) compiled a collection... [if there are more than two authors]

There has been a wealth of research into this (Studdert-Kennedy1998, 2000; Studdert-Kennedy and Goldstein 2003).

Reference format examples: Reference section

The references should be arranged alphabetically, and works by the same author should be sorted chronologically.

Ashby, M. and J. Maidment. 2005. Introducing phonetic science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, B. and I. Mees. 1996. "Spreading everywhere? How recent a phenomenon is glottalisation in Received Pronunciation?" English World Wide 17/2. 175-187.

Fabricius, A. "Ongoing change in modern RP. Evidence for the disappearing stigma of t-glottalling". English World-Wide 23/1. 115-136.

Gibbon, D. 2005. "Afterword: Navigating pronunciation in search of the Golden Fleece". In: Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, K. and J. Przedlacka (eds.), English pronunciation models: A changing scene. Bern: Peter Lang. 439-464.

Knight, C., M. Studdert-Kennedy and J. Hurford (eds.). 2000. The evolutionary emergence of language: Social function and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ladefoged, P. 2001. A course in phonetics. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

Studdert-Kennedy, M. 1998. "The particulate origins of language generativity: From syllable to gesture". In: Hurford, J., M. Studdert-Kennedy and C. Knight (eds.), Approaches to the evolution of language: Social and cognitive bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Studdert-Kennedy, M. 2000. "Evolutionary implications of the particulate principle: Imitation and the dissociation of phonetic form from semantic function". In: Kinght, C. et al. (eds.). 161-176.

Studdert-Kennedy, M and L. Goldstein. 2003. "Launching language: The gestural origin of discrete infinity". In: Christiansen, M. and S. Kirby (eds.), Language evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 235-254.