Submissions

Author Guidelines

Please read these style guidelines carefully. Putting your manuscript into JSL style will be much appreciated and will significantly facilitate the edito­rial process. You may also download them as a PDF file. Please see our Ethics statement for an overview of our publishing/review process.

It is not essential that contributors accommodate every last formatting detail below at the time of first submission. Since acceptance to JSL is selective and the review process typically requires significant revision, there will be opportunity to satisfy the more arcane bits of formatting upon resubmission. However, to the extent that contributors can do things our way, it simplifies our task and that of the reviewers, as well as reducing the likelihood that we will introduce extraneous errors as manuscripts are prepared for publication.

Questions may be addressed to any editor or to journalofslaviclinguistics@gmail.com.
Please note that all authors must be members in good standing of the Slavic Linguistics Society.

1. Submission Requirements
Please single-space all documents, including examples. In published form the articles may have footnotes, but should follow the author-date style with a list of accompanying references (see below). 

All submissions to JSL should be made through the ojs.ung.si website. For the first submission only the .PDF version of your submission is required. Manuscripts must be presented anonymously to facilitate double-blind review. The author's name should not be announced explicitly on the manuscript itself. While it is not necessary to adopt extraordinary measures to eliminate all self-citation, you should avoid obvious identifying text (e.g., "... as I wrote in [name] 2003..."). Please include your address and institutional affiliation in the comments accompanying your submission.

All manuscripts must be written in English. Authors whose English is non-native should have their manuscripts reviewed for language before submission.

We will request both Word and .pdf versions for final preparation of accepted submissions. At that time we will request copies of any special screen fonts used, as well as any special graphics files for diagrams, maps, etc.

Below we provide representative examples for different kinds of references. Consult recent issues of JSL for additional examples of correct formatting.

2. General Style
JSL follows The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. for spelling, and scientific standard of transliteration of Cyrillic.

First submission should use 12-point font, text should be single-spaced, and margins should be standard (e.g. 3.18 cm). With these specifications the first submission must not be longer than 30 pages.

3. Opener

3.1. Title. The title of your paper should be short and descriptive of the content.

3.2. Your name and affiliation. These will be added only after the paper is accepted for publication.

3.3. Abstract. A one-paragraph abstract should be included at the head of the paper; shorter articles should generally have correspondingly shorter abstracts. While first person may be used in the body of the paper, first person is never acceptable in the abstract. In addition to the topic, aim and relevance of the study reported on, the abstract should also include at least a preview of the results.

4. Text

4.1. Transliteration. For transliterating Cyrillic use the scientific or international system, e.g., Šaxmatov, not Shakhmatov, and Jarceva, not Yartseva.. When a Cyrillic-based publication gives Western names in transliteration, e.g., Joxan Xell'bek, please also give the Western spelling, e.g., Jochen Hellbeck. A handy table of Cyrillic transliteration is given in every issue of the Slavic and east European journal.

4.2. Numbers. Numbers one to ten should be spelled out; 11 and over must be in numerals. Exceptions: If the number is the first word in the sen­tence, it should be written out regardless of size ("Eight hundred men went into the army."). If one number is in numerals, all other numbers in the same sentence should be in numerals regardless of size ("The military equipment sent to the three camps included 15 tanks, 2 planes, and 100 pieces of artillery." Note that three, which is not part of the series, is written out). This also applies to dates (ninth century, 19th century).

4.3. Dates. JSL uses day month year (e.g., 1 October 2003).

4.4. Multi-level headings. If an article includes headings, subheadings, sub-subheadings, etc., they should be numbered for clarity. Example:
   3. Empirical Data
   [...]
   3.4. Testing the Strategy
   3.4.1. Players
   3.4.2. Processes

Consecutive headings should be separated by text, even if only one or two sentences. Subheadings, etc. should not occur singularly, but should be accompanied by at least a second subheading (e.g., 2.1.1 should occur with at least 2.1.2). Headings are given flush left, with blank lines above and below. All headings are formatted in the same way regardless of the level of a given heading. The first paragraph after a heading should be flush left, not indented like most paragraphs. Paragraphs should not be numbered without corresponding section headings.

5. Figures and Tables
Figures should be submitted in separate files as camera-ready copy. If scan­ning, please use 300dpi resolution and save as a TIFF file. Tables can be included in the file if set up using Word's Table feature or submitted as cam­era-ready copy in separate files if you are not using Word. In either case, please let us know in your accompanying message/cover letter how you created your figures and tables. Graphics inserted in the text of an article appear at the periphery of the page
(top or bottom), and they will normally be placed at the first available peripheral position after the reference in the text.

6. Examples and Data

6.1. In-text examples. Brief examples may be included in running text, where they should be italicized: "Note, however, that the expected jači and jakne (*ę- > ě- > ja-) ‘resound; moan’ also occur" (Janda and Friedman, JSL 2(2): 282).

6.2. Numbered examples. Sentence-length or longer examples, lists of related single-word examples, and any sets of material which will be referred to later in the paper should be set out from the text as sequentially numbered items, following standard linguistic practice. Examples set out from the text are not normally italicized, unless they must be distinguished from other nonitalicized material for clarity's sake. 

6.3. Examples in footnotes. Within footnotes, examples are given lower-case Roman numerals. Numbering restarts with (i) in each footnote. Otherwise, the same practice should be followed as with numbered examples in the main text.

6.4. Glossing. All examples from languages besides English must be glossed. Single words should be glossed on first occurrence, but the gloss need not be repeated; similarly, morphological information (e.g., person, number, and tense for verb forms) may be provided in the text upon the first occurrence of a form, if it is relevant to the linguistic point being made or necessary for the reader's orientation, but need not be repeated later unless required for clarity.

6.5. Syntactic examples. Syntactic examples should normally include both a word-by-word gloss and a sentential translation, e.g.:

(3) a. Budet li on žit          v   Moskve?                              (Russian)
          will     Q he live-INF in Moscow
         "Will he live in Moscow?"
  b. *Žit'         li  on budet v  Moskve?
        live-INF Q  he will     in Moscow

Word-by-word glosses should be aligned with the corresponding words in the original example by the use of tabs (not spaces!). Glossing should follow the Leipzig Glossing rules. Grammatical information should be given in small caps (e.g., neg, cl, aux, etc.). Note also that no sentential translation is normally given for ungrammatical examples such as (3b), but when this seems necessary they can be followed with a line showing the intended interpretation. 

(3) b. *Žit'         li  on budet v  Moskve?
            live-INF Q  he will     in Moscow
            [Intended] "Will he live in Moscow?"

6.6. Other examples. In cases where the example is exceedingly long, or involves discourse analysis without reference to the internal details of the sentence(s) included, it is acceptable to give only a sentential translation (cf. Meyer, this issue).

6.7. Referencing examples. When examples are set out from the text, they may be introduced by number ("...as shown in (12).") or by a sentence ("...as shown in the following example."). However, do not break off a sentence for a set-off example and then resume the sentence after the example. Do not start a sentence with an example number; instead preface it with a classificational word, e.g. "Example (12) shows that...", and not "(12) shows that...".

6.8. Tabular data. Certain types of data may be more convenient to display in the form of tables, which should be numbered separately. Similarly, separately numbered figures may be included. See information in the section above on Tables and Figures.

7. Punctuation

7.1. Basics. JSL takes its guiding principles for the main text from the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS).

7.2. Quotation marks. Double quotes are used for most purposes: direct quotations, article titles, and distancing from uncertain terminology (so-called scare quotes). Single quotes are only used for linguistic glosses and quotation marks embedded inside other quotation marks. We prefer the use of asymmetrical ("typographer's") quotes.

7.3. Bold face. Bold face type is used for headings of various types (title of paper, author's name, section and subsection headings, table numbers), as well as for emphasis within running text. If necessary, small caps may be used as an additional means of emphasis.

7.4. Italics. Italics are used for linguistic examples within running text (but not for emphasis), certain marked foreign-language expressions (only those that do not appear in a standard English dictionary), as well as titles of book-length works or abbreviations representing such works. Do not use underlining as a substitute. Underlining is very rarely used as an additional typographic device separate from italics and boldface.

7.5. Commas. Use a comma before "and" and "or" in conjunctions of three or more items, e.g., "nouns, pronouns, and numerals." If there is a list of italicized examples, it is preferable to use non-italicized commas between them, e.g., "...collective numerals have the forms dvoje, troje, četvero, petero, etc. ..." (Lučić, JSL 23(1): 15). Similarly, other punctuation marks should not be italicized unless they are part of a book title (right parentheses are particularly susceptible to lingering italics!).

7.6. Dashes and hyphens.

7.6.1. M-dash. Use an m-dash (shift-option-hyphen) with no surrounding spaces for dashes; if no typographic m-dash is available, use a double hyphen.

7.6.2. N-dash. Use n-dashes (option-hyphen) for page ranges (e.g., 217--18) and dates (e.g., 1887--1955).

7.6.3. Hyphen. Use plain hyphens for hyphenated words as well as for parts of words (e.g., -a, grad-, etc.) Hyphens should also be inserted when a phrase is used attributively, as in "third-person ending," (cf. "in the third person"), "a first-declension noun" (cf. "in the first declension"), etc. Do not insert hyphens within words to achieve more elegant line breaks, as these are likely to change during formatting. Do not use non-breaking hyphens or non-breaking spaces to keep material together on a single line; instead use soft carriage returns, as these are easier to spot when we format for publication.

7.7. Spaces. Always use single rather than double spaces after periods, colons, or other punctuation. Never use spaces for formatting purposes; use tabs instead for alignment and spacing.

7.8. Abbreviations. The use of clear and unobtrusive abbreviations is encouraged, including (but not necessarily limited to) the following situations:

  (i) commonly-used grammatical terms, e.g., "acc" for "accusative", "3sg" for "third-person singular";

  (ii) names of languages referred to frequently within an article (a representative list is given in Townsend, JSL 1(2): 375, fn. 1);
  (iii) titles of works and databases referred to regularly, e.g., RG for Russkaja grammatika, SRJ for Slovar' russkogo jazyka, RNC for the Russian National Corpus.

Please note that if the original title is italicized, so should be the abbreviation. Note that none of these abbreviations regularly requires a period; a period may, however, be used in common abbreviations such as "U.S." It is useful to collect the abbreviations used in an article into a single footnote near the beginning of the paper, as in the papers by Bethin, Marušič and Žaucer, or Zanon in 22(2) and the papers by Lučić and Speed in 23(1). The use of confusing abbreviations should be avoided, e.g., if "imperfective," "imperfect," and "imperative" all occur frequently, it is probably best not to use abbreviations.

8. Footnotes

8.1. Usage. Footnotes should be discursive rather than bibliographic.

8.2. Style. Footnotes go at the bottom of the page and should be numbered consecutively through the entire manuscript.

8.3. Acknowledgements note. Many contributors include a first footnote marked with an asterisk (not numbered) containing acknowledgments, information about the history and provenance of the paper, etc.

Note that in light of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, starting 2022 and until further notice, JSL will not publish acknowledgments that include reference to funding agencies from the Russian Federation. 

9. Author-Date Reference Style

9.1. Citing the author vs. the work. Bibliographic references in the text take two primary forms, depending on whether the author or the work is referred to. Compare the following examples:
  Author: "Rivero (1991) suggests that..." [King, JSL 2(2): 290, fn. 8]
  Work: "See Progovac 1993 and references therein for a discussion of..." [King, JSL 2(2): 293, fn. 12]

If the author is referred to, then the date goes into parentheses (and a page number or range may also be given, e.g., "Rivero (1991: 666–72) suggests that..."). When referring to a work as a whole, "Progovac 1993" is taken as a unit, and the date is not set off by parentheses. In such cases no specific page will be cited. However, references of the following form are possible: "See Progovac 1993 (esp. 15–17) for a discussion of...". Finally, it is also possible to give a reference within parentheses without explicitly integrating either the author or the work into the sentence where it is cited. In this case, the reference takes the following form: "A critical feature of autosegmental phonology is the general restriction that association lines may not cross (Goldsmith 1990: 47), and..." [Birnbaum, 270]. Do not embed parentheses within parentheses in such cases.

9.2. Specificity in citations. Authors are encouraged to provide explicit page references whenever possible, rather than blanket references to, e.g., Rivero 1991; this makes it easier for the interested reader to locate the material referred to without extensive searching. We prefer explicit page ranges (e.g., 666–68) instead of the open-ended 666ff, which are discouraged by CMS.

9.3. Multiple authors. When referring to two authors in the text, list both names, e.g., "Marušič and Žaucer (2013) state...." When referring to a work by three authors, list all three names, e.g., "In Hornstein, Nunes, and Grohmann 2005...." If a publication has four or more authors, in citing that publication just the first author's name should be used, followed by "et al."

10. References

10.1. Reference List. A list of references should follow at the end of the article. All works cited within the text must appear in this list. The listing of additional works not cited within the paper is discouraged. The list should be formatted with a standard hanging indent. Any reference with a non-English title should be equipped with a provisional English translation in square brackets.

10.2. Journal articles. Use the author's full name (except for scholars, especially Russians, who are best known by their initials, e.g., E. A. Zemskaja). The date follows in parentheses. The title is capitalized in the British fashion, i.e., only capitalize the initial word of titles, words that are always capitalized, and words immediately after a colon. The period appears outside of the quotation marks. The journal title is capitalized in the same way and not abbreviated. Volume and number are both given, if available. Page range repeats last two digits. For example:

Robblee, Karen E. (1994) "Russian word order and the lexicon". Journal of Slavic linguistics 2(2): 238–67.

In the case of coauthors, two are listed as follows:

Brown, Dunstan P. and Andrew R. Hippisley. (1994) "Conflict in Russian genitive plural assignment". Journal of Slavic linguistics 2(1): 48–76.

In accordance with CMS include all the authors' names if there are up to and including seven names in the reference list. Eight or more names should be listed as the first name followed by "et al."

10.3. Articles in books. Use capitalization after colon in title. No introductory "in" as bridge to book reference. Editors are given in first name-last name order. Standard state code is added to less common city names. If published by a state university press, no state abbreviation should be used (e.g., "Bloomington: Indiana University Press"). No "pp." is used before the page range. For example:

Chvany, Catherine V. (1984) "Backgrounded perfectives and plot line imperfectives: Towards a theory of grounding in text". Michael S. Flier and Alan Timberlake, eds. The scope of Slavic aspect. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 247–73.

[Note that if JSL had published this paper, our Style Sheet would have hyphenated "plot line"!]

10.4. Books. Use the author's full name. Date follows in parentheses. Title is capitalized in the British fashion (see 10.2 above). City of publication is followed by a colon and then the publisher's name. If the reference is part of a series, series title and number are given at end of reference in square brackets. For example:

Guiraud-Weber, Marguerite. (1984) Les propositions sans nominatif en russe moderne [Nominativeless Clauses in Modern Russian]. Paris: Institut d'études slaves. [Biblioteque russe de l'Institut d'études slaves, 69.]

10.5. Books with abbreviated titles. The abbreviation is taken as the main entry of the book, so the date follows it. The editor is given as an afterthought. For example:

[RG] (1980) Russkaja grammatika [Russian Grammar]. N. Ju. Švedova, ed. Moscow: Nauka, vol. 1.

If there are more than a half-dozen or so abbreviated titles, a separate section, after the main references, can be utilized with only the abbreivated sources.

10.6. Dissertations. Dissertation titles are treated as book titles and italicized. University names are not abbreviated. When a specific campus is referenced, separate it by a comma (e.g., University of California, Berkeley). For example:

Ewen, Robert. (1979) A grammar of Bulgarian clitics. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.

10.7. Unpublished works. These are treated as articles, even if they are of book length. List the institutional affiliation of the author that corresponds with the listed date. An accompanying URL is helpful, though not obligatory. For example:

Babyonyshev, Maria A., Lesley Hart, Jodi Reich, Julia Kuznetsova, Robyn Rissman, and Elena L. Grigorenko. (2007) "Ocenka razvitija russkogo jazyka" [Assessment of the Development of Russian]. Unpublished ms., Yale University.

Note: Only use this style if the article has not been published. If the article is published after submission, all in-text citations and the reference will need to be changed for publication.

10.8. Conference presentations and posters. The author, date, and title should follow the format of journal articles. Provide descriptive language (e.g., "Paper presented at" or "Poster presented at") followed by the name of the conference, the location, and the inclusive dates. For example:

Zanon, Ksenia. (2014) "Russian anaphoric possessive in context". Paper presented at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 23, Berkeley, 2–5 May 2014.

10.9. Multiple dates. Standard bibliographic practice mandates reference to the first publication of a given work. However, for the convenience of both author and reader a later, more accessible edition may be cited, in the following form:

Jakobson, Roman. (1929/1971) "Remarques sur l'évolution phono­logique du russe comparée a celle des autres langues slaves" [Remarks on the Phonological Evolution of Russian Compared to Other Slavic Languages]. Selected writings. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton, 7–116.

Points to note: the first version is represented only by the first date. Full bibliographic information is provided for the version actually referred to. Page references in the text (e.g., "as first suggested by Jakobson (1929/1971: 86)...") will be understood to refer to the later edition. 

10.10. URLs. Links to source materials on the World Wide Web should be provided at the end of a given citation, as in the following example: 

Feldstein, Ronald F. (2007) "Russian dual stem aspectual syncretism and the opposition of phase and determinacy". Glossos 9. Available at: www.seelrc.org/glossos/issues/9 .