Styleguide

The following styleguide details how to create a publishable article using the REALIS journal template. REALIS submissions should ideally be made with LaTeX. The template for REALIS submissions (v. 3.0 or higher) can be found here:

This styleguide including specifics of the REALIS style sheet, short code examples for basic LaTeX and information about the submission process. For a more detailed overview of how to work with LaTeX and this template, we refer to Language Science Press in their comprehensive set of guidelines, in particular Section 3 on Style rules for basic LaTeX commands and Section 5 on how to install and use LaTeX.

Make sure to compile the file with XeLaTeX (e. g. in Overleaf under Menu, then Settings > Compiler).

Style sheet
The REALIS style sheet is based on The Generic Style Rules for Linguistics (December 2014 version), developed under a CC-BY licence by Martin Haspelmath.

a) Anonymisation
The names of all authors, affiliations, contact details and the corresponding au.thor details should not be added to the submitted files until after editorial ac.ceptance.

b) Parts of the text
The title should not contain any capitalisation apart from the first word and words that need capitals in any context. In the final version of the accepted paper, the title is followed by the first and last name of the author(s), their affiliation, and e-mail. First names should not include only initials.

Articles must have the main text prefaced by an abstract of no more than 250 words summarising the main arguments and conclusions of the article. A list of up to six key words may be placed below the abstract.
Articles are subdivided into numbered sections (and possibly subsections, au.tomatically numbered 1.1 etc., and subsubsections, automatically numbered 1.1.1 etc.), with a bold-faced heading in each case. The numbering always begins with 1, not 0. Section headings do not end with a period, and have no special capital.ization.

The conclusion is the last numbered section. It may be followed by several (optional) unnumbered sections: Abbreviations, Supplementary files, Ethics and consent, Funding information, Acknowledgements, Competing Interests, and Au.thors’ contributions, in this order.

The last part is the list of bibliographical references (References). For the style of references, see below.

c) Numbered examples and formulae
Examples from languages other than English must be glossed (with word-by.word alignment) and translated (cf. the Leipzig Glossing Rules recommended as basic guidelines here). Example numbers are enclosed in parentheses, and left.aligned. Example sentences usually have normal capitalization at the beginning and normal punctuation. The gloss line has no capitalization and no punctuation.

(1) a. Ich kenne das Kind, dem du geholfen hast.
I.nom know the child.acc who.dat you.nom helped have
‘I know the child that you helped.’
b. Ich kenne das Kind, dem du nicht geholfen hast.
I.nom know the child.acc who.dat you.nom neg helped have
‘I know the child that you didn’t help.’

When the example is not a complete sentence, there is no capitalization and no full stop at the end. If the name of the language is added, the source of the exam.ple, or any extra information, this information must be added on an extra first line of the example (with the name of the language in italics).1

2) German (van Coetsem 2000)
das Kind, dem du geholfen hast
the child.nom who.dat you.nom helped have
‘the child that you helped’

Use the included langsci-gb4e package to typeset your examples as illustrated above, following the structure \ea at the beginning and \z at the end for simple examples and for subexamples use \eal at the beginning \ex prior to each example and \zl at the end. Glossed interlinear examples are typeset with \gll before the example: the first line is for the object language and must be closed with a \; the second line is for the glosses, closed again with a \. The translation is added with \glt before the translation line. See also example code below:

Simple example:

\ea Simple example \z

Subexamples:

\eal
\ex Example 1
\ex Example 2
\zl

Glossed example:

\ea
\gll object language \\
gloss1 gloss2 \\
\glt `translation'
\z

Examples in footnotes are numbered with lower case Roman numerals enclosed between brackets:

(i) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
More text can follow the example.

Ungrammatical examples can be given a parenthesized idiomatic translation. A literal translation may be given in parentheses after the idiomatic translation.

The use of any nonstandard layout in examples beyond what is illustrated above is strongly discouraged, as this will increase production time of your paper. If you feel an example needs additional explanation, try as much as possible to provide this in the text that goes with the example.

Formulae must be proofed carefully by the author. Editors will not edit formu.lae. If special software has been used to create formulae, the way they are laid out is the way they will appear in the publication.

d) Use of footnotes/endnotes
Use footnotes rather than endnotes. These will appear at the bottom of each page. Notes should be used only where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed.

Avoid using notes for purposes of referencing, with in-text citations used in.stead. If in-text citations cannot be used, a source can be cited as part of a note. Please insert the footnote marker after the end punctuation.

The footnote reference number normally follows a period or a comma, though exceptionally it may follow an individual word. Footnote numbers start with 1. Examples in footnotes have the numbers (i), (ii), etc.

e) Tables and figures
Tables and figures are treated as floats in typesetting. This means that their placement on the page will not necessarily be where you put it in your manuscript, as this may lead to large parts of the page ending up white (e. g. when a table or figure does not fit on the current page anymore and wraps onto the follow.ing page). For this reason, you must always refer to tables and figures in the running text, as in the following example: ‘In certain languages, the superlative transparently contains the comparative morphologically, as illustrated in Table 1 (Bobaljik 2012: 46).’ This can be achieved by putting a \label{label name} command in the float and referring to it in the text using \ref{label name}. Do not refer to tables and figures using the words ‘following’, ‘below’ or ‘above’, as the final placement of your table or figure may be different from where you placed them in your manuscript.

Lines are used at the top (\toprule) and bottom (\bottomrule), and after the header (\midrule). Optionally, \hline may be used to separate rows by lines, but this is not recommended for most tables.

Tables and figures are numbered consecutively. Each table and each figure has a caption. The caption is placed below figures, but above tables, with only the figure or table number in bold. The caption ends in a full stop. Examples are shown in the captions of Table 1 and Figure 1. All figures must be included in the figures-folder, if possible in colour and at a resolution of at least 300dpi. No file should be larger than 20MB. Standard formats accepted are: jpg, tiff, gif, png, eps. For line drawings, please provide the original vector file (e.g. .ai, or .eps).

Tables should not include:

• Rotated text

• Colour to denote meaning (it will not display the same on all devices)

• Images

• Diagonal lines

• Multiple parts (e.g. ‘Table 1a’ and ‘Table 1b’). These should either be merged into one table, or separated into ‘Table 1’ and ‘Table 2’.

If there are more columns than can fit on a single page, the table will be rotated by 90 degrees to fit on the page. Do not use tables that cannot fit onto a single page. Tree diagrams should be treated as examples, not as figures. The LATEX environment for trees is provided by the forest
package.

f) In-text citations
The short reference form used in the text consists of the author’s surname and the publication year, followed by page numbers where necessary. Brackets surround the year, except if the citation is already inside brackets, in which case there are no brackets around the year. If there are more than two authors, the first name plus et al. can be used. The formatting is done automatically with the cite commands in LATEX.

Use the natbib commands to create inline references:

For bracketed citations: \citep[before citation text][after citation text]{citekey}
For textual citation (author without brackets): \citet[before citation text][after citation text]{citekey}

• Murray & Vennemann (1983) point out that …

• The notation we use to represent this is borrowed from theories according to which theta-features occur in a so-called feature geometry (McCarthy & Prince 1999: 248-250).

• Baker et al. (1989) = Baker, Johnson & Roberts (1989)

When multiple citations are listed, they are separated by semicolons and listed in chronological order. Multiple references to the same author do not repeat re.dundant information.

• Multiple authors have belaboured this point (Chomsky 1981, 1986a,b, Iverson 1989, Casali 1998, Blevins 2004, Franks 2005).

Surnames with internal complexity have upper or lower case according to how the author spells his/her own name, e.g.:

• It has been claimed by de Swart (1998) and De Belder (2011) that meaning is compositional.

Chinese and Korean names may be treated in a special way: as the surnames are often not very distinctive, the full name may be given in the in-text citation, e.g.

• … the neutral negation bù is compatible with stative and activity verbs (cf. Teng Shou-hsin 1973; Hsieh Miao-Ling 2001; Lin Jo-wang 2003)

g) References
Create your references using a .bib-file with BibTeX entries. Nordhoff (2018) is useful for compiling bibliographies. The following rules apply:

What you need to do:

• The names of authors and editors should be given in their full form as in the publication, without truncation of given names.

• Page numbers of journals are obligatory (issue numbers preferred).

• Journal titles are not abbreviated.

• Titles of works written in a language that readers cannot be expected to know should be accompanied by a translation, given in square brackets (Li
1999).

• No author names are omitted, i.e. et al. is not used in the BibTeX entry.

What LATEX does for you:

• All author names are given in the order Firstname Lastname, except for the first author of a bibliography item whose name serves to place the item in the alphabetical order. In this case, the order is Lastname, Firstname.

• Main title and subtitle are separated by a colon, not by a period.

• When there are more than two authors (or editors), each pair of names is separated by a comma, except the last two, which are separated by an ampersand.

• Names of book series directly follow the book title, without intervening punctuation. They appear between brackets and in roman font. They may be accompanied by an (optional) issue number.

There are four standard reference types: journal article, book, article in edited book, thesis. Works that do not fit easily into these types should be assimilated to them to the extent that this is possible. See the bibliography at the end of this article for examples.

Surnames with internal complexity are never treated in a special way. Thus, Dutch or German surnames that begin with van or von (e.g. van Riemsdijk) or French and Dutch surnames that begin with with de (e. g. de Saussure) are al.phabetized under the first part, even though they begin with a lower-case letter. Thus, the following names are sorted alphabetically as indicated:

• Da Milano, Federica

• de Groot, Casper

• De Schutter, Georges

• de Saussure, Ferdinand

• van der Auwera, Johan

• Van Langendonck, Willy

• van Riemsdijk, Henk

• von Humboldt, Wilhelm

Example References
Baker, Mark, Kyle Johnson & Ian Roberts. 1989. Passive arguments raised. Lin.guistic Inquiry 20. 219–251.
Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer.sity Press.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1925. On the sound-system of central Algonquian. Language 1(4). 130–156.
Bobaljik, Jonathan. 2012. Universals in comparative morphology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Casali, Roderic. 1998. Predicting ATR activity. Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 34(1). 55–68.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Chomsky, Noam. 1986a. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1986b. Knowledge of language. New York: Praeger.
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language universals and linguistic typology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
De Belder, Marijke. 2011. A morphosyntactic decomposition of countability in Germanic. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 14. 173–202. DOI: 10.
1007/s10828-011-9045-0.
de Swart, Henriëtte. 1998. Aspect shift and coercion. Natural Language and Lin.guistic Theory 16. 347–385. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4047954.
Franks, Steven. 2005. Bulgarian clitics are positioned in the syntax. Ms. Indiana University.
Iverson, Gregory. 1989. On the category supralaryngeal. Phonology 6. 285–303.
Lahiri, Aditi (ed.). 2000a. Analogy, leveling, markedness: Principles of change in phonology and morphology (Trends in Linguistics 127). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lahiri, Aditi (ed.). 2000b. Analogy, leveling, markedness: Principles of change in phonology and morphology (Trends in Linguistics 127). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Li, Rulong. 1999. Minnan fangyan de daici [Demonstrative and personal pro.nouns in southern Min]. In Rulong Li & Song-Hing Chang (eds.), Daici [Demonstrative and personal pronouns], 263–287. Guangzhou: Ji’nan Univer.sity Press.
Massam, Diane. 2000. VSO versus VOS: aspects of Niuean word order. In Andrew Carnie & Eithne Guilfoyle (eds.), The syntax of verb initial languages (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax), 97–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCarthy, John & Alan Prince. 1999. Prosodic morphology. In John Goldsmith (ed.), Phonological theory: The essential readings, 238–288. Malden, MA & Ox.ford: Blackwell.
Murray, Robert & Theo Vennemann. 1983. Sound change and syllable structure in Germanic phonology. Language 59(3). 514–528.
Nordhoff, Sebastian. 2018. BibTeX generator. Follow the link to generate BibTeX. https://www.langsci-press-gug.org/doc2tex/doc2bib.
Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rissanen, Matti. 1999. Syntax. In Roger Lass (ed.), Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 3, 187–331. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stewart, Thomas W., Jr. 2000. Mutation as morphology: Bases, stems, and shapes in Scottish Gaelic. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University. (Doctoral disser.tation).
van Coetsem, Frans. 2000. A general and unified theory of the transmission process in language contact. Heidelberg: Winter.
Warner, Natasha, Erin Good, Allard Jongman & Joan Sereno. 2006. Orthographic vs. morphological incomplete neutralization effects. Journal of Phonetics 34(2). 285–293.
Yu, Alan. 2003. The morphology and phonology of infixation. Berkeley, CA: Uni.versity of California. (Doctoral dissertation).

 

h) Typographical matters

Capitalization
Sentences, proper names and titles/headings/captions start with a capital letter, but there is no special capitalization (“title case”) within English titles/headings, neither in the article title nor in section headings or figure captions. Capitaliza.tion is also used after the colon in titles, i.e. for the beginning of subtitles.
Capitalization is used only for parts of the article (chapters, figures, tables, appendixes) when they are numbered, e.g.

• as shown in Table 5

• more details are given in Chapter 3

• this is illustrated in Figure 17 Please refrain from the use of FULL CAPS (except for abbreviations).

Italics
Italics are used in the following cases:

• for technical terms and all object-language forms (letters, words, phrases, sentences) that are cited within the text, unless they are phonetic transcrip.tions or phonological representations in IPA.

• for emphasis within the text of a particular word that is not a technical term.

• for emphasis within a quotation, with the indication [emphasis mine/ours] at the end of the quotation.

• for the name of the language in examples.

In numbered examples, do not use italics to highlight particular parts of the ex.ample; use bold instead.

Small caps
Small caps are used for grammatical categories in the interlinear glosses in ex.amples (e.g. fut, neg, sg, obl, etc.). They are also used for indicating stressed syllables or words in example sentences.

Boldface and other highlighting
Boldface can be used to draw the reader’s attention to particular aspects of a linguistic example, whether given within the text or as a numbered example. Full caps, underlining, or italics are not normally used for highlighting.

Quotation marks
Double quotation marks are used

• when a passage from another work is cited in the text.

• when a technical term or other expression is mentioned that the author does not want to adopt.

Ellipsis in a quotation is indicated by […]. Single quotation marks are used exclusively for linguistic meanings, e.g.

• Latin habere ‘have’ is not cognate with Old English hafian ‘have’.

Quotes within quotes are not treated in a special way. Note that quotations from other languages should be translated (inline if they are short, in a footnote if they are longer).

Abbreviations
When a complex term that is not widely known is referred to frequently, it may be abbreviated (e.g. DOC for “double-object construction”). The abbreviation should be given in the text when it is first used.

Abbreviations of uncommon expressions are not used in headings or captions, and they should be avoided at the beginning of a chapter or major section.

Abbreviations used in glossed examples should be listed in a separate section following the conclusions. For a list of standard abbreviations, refer to the Leipzig glossing rules.

For abbreviations such as i. e. , e. g. or vs. use the following LATEX commands for correct typesetting:
\ie = i.e. \eg = e.g. \vs = v.s.