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Editorial policy

English Language and Linguistics (ELL) is an international journal which focuses on the description of the English language within the framework of contemporary linguistics. The journal is concerned equally with the synchronic and the diachronic aspects of English language studies and publishes articles of the highest quality which make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the structure and development of the English language and which are informed by a knowledge and appreciation of linguistic theory. 

ELL carries articles and short discussion papers or squibs on all core aspects of English, from its beginnings to the present day, including syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics and lexis.

Please note that ELL does not publish work on the teaching of English as a second or additional language, on English for Specific Purposes, or on applied linguistics generally. ELL also does not publish papers containing extensive cross linguistic comparisons nor those which focus on literary stylistic analysis.

• ELL is happy to consider replies to articles published earlier in its pages, but all submissions should be self-standing contributions to research. 
• Short notes (or 'Squibs') can be appropriate if they are exclusively tied around one entirely novel point. 
• ELL publishes reviews of recent work on the linguistics of English and also Review Articles, which should themselves seek to take the debate in the reviewed work forward. 
• One issue every year is normally a guest-edited Special Issue, containing a number of articles which are thematically linked. Proposals for special issues are solicited once a year, but may be submitted to the Editors at any time.

Preparation of manuscripts

Articles and Squibs

Please note that, in order to submit a piece for consideration for publication in ELL, you should:

• format it in line with the 'Guidelines for formatting and style' below; 
• we prefer that you submit your originals for the initial submission as a PDF file as this will avoid any formatting problems, but the ScholarOne system also accepts manuscripts in Word format; 
• for the final submission, if an article is accepted for publication, it should be submitted in Word format as well.
• make sure that the manuscript is totally anonymous, with no indication of who has written the piece anywhere in the paper (or its front or end matter); this might include removing acknowledgements (which can be reinserted after review) and obvious references to your own work.

Word length. Please note that only papers of no more than 10,000 words, including references and footnotes, should normally be submitted for consideration for publication in ELL.
If a longer manuscript is submitted for some particular reason, you should include a note making a case for an exception to this limit as part of the ‘Cover Letter’ that you can type in when you submit the manuscript through the Scholar One system.

Fonts and characters. Most characters necessary for representing Old or Middle English, and for phonetic/phonological characters are now contained in standard fonts, which should therefore be used wherever possible. Additional letters and phonetic/phonological characters should where possible be taken from the Doulos SIL font, available from: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=DoulosSIL.

Book Reviews and Review Articles

All Reviews (i.e. all Book Reviews and Review Articles) in ELL are commissioned by the Review Editor.

Word length. Reviews are generally 2,000-3,000 words in length, as stipulated by the Review Editor. The Review Editor determines the length of Review Articles.
Manuscripts which substantially exceed the word limit may be cut or sent back to the author to be shortened. If neither is acceptable to the author, the review editor may ask for the hard copy (if such has been supplied) to be returned so that another reviewer can be found.

Style guidelines. Please submit the review through ScholarOne, as described in the 'Submitting your materials' section, following the 'Guidelines for formatting and style' below as closely as possible. Note especially the guidelines in Section 17 for standard Book Reviews and in Section 18 for Review Articles. Any queries about reviews should be directed to the Review Editor.

Formatting and style guidelines for submissions

Please follow the guidelines below in the preparation of your manuscript. The requirements apply equally to all categories of contribution – Articles, Squibs and Review Articles – with a few exceptions for Review Articles, set out in Section 18.

Guidelines for Book Review authors are set out in Section 17.

The format and style requirements listed below are to facilitate a smooth conversion of text from file(s) into the final PDF manuscript. Please note that if many adjustments are required, then this may be a source of new typographic and other errors in the printed version. The Editors reserve the right to return a manuscript, asking for an improved format, which may result in a delay in publication. 

Authors may like to refer to a recent issue of English Language and Linguistics to confirm certain features of formatting and style. 

1. Organisation and pagination of the manuscript

Final manuscript version. The various components of the FINAL VERSION of a manuscript should appear in the following order: 

• title page
• abstract
• keywords
• article’s main text
• author’s address
• appendix (if applicable)
• references. 

Insert a page number in the top right corner of every page; number continuously throughout the entire manuscript. The various components of the manuscript are to follow in the order just given.

Title page. The title page should include only the title of the article, author’s name and affiliation, on separate lines and centred, as in the pattern shown here. 

Article title
AUTHOR’S NAME
Author’s affiliation

An acknowledgements footnote should be marked with a superscript ‘1’ – not an asterisk – at the end of the title. The rest of the page should be left blank for copy-editing purposes. The title page of a Review Article is slightly different (see section below). NB: preliminary versions of a manuscript submitted for review should not have the author’s name, address or acknowledgements, as they need to be anonymous.

2. Spacing and margins

Double-space throughout. Leave 3cm/1.5" margins on all four sides of all the pages. Except for the first paragraph of a new section or subsection, the first line of every new paragraph is indented. Please do not mark paragraph breaks by extra line spacing.

3. Abstract and keywords

Article abstracts (but usually not abstracts of Review Articles) will appear in the final PDF. The abstract, on a separate page, should follow the title page of an Article.

Following the abstract, please list up to five keywords, which should explain the content of the piece very briefly; these keywords should match those entered in Scholar One: e.g. ‘Keywords: Phonology, Liverpool English, Old English, Tag questions’.

4. Section and subsection headings

These should be typed on separate lines, in small capitals and italics, respectively, numbered and punctuated exactly as in the following example:

1 PHONOLOGICAL STRUCTURE
1.1 Metrical phonology
1.1.1 Metrical grids

5. Style

Contributors should be sensitive to the social implications of language choice and seek wording free of discriminatory overtones in matters such as race and gender.

The style of writing should be non-elliptical: abbreviations of rule names, languages, etc. are to be kept to an absolute minimum and clearly introduced at first occurrence. If abbreviations of less commonly-known technical terms are used extensively in an article, they should be set out clearly in a footnote or an end-of-article glossary. Natural data sources (from Old English texts, contemporary novels, etc.) should be clearly identified.

EVERY EFFORT SHOULD BE MADE BY NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH TO HAVE THEIR FINAL DRAFT CHECKED BY A COLLEAGUE WHO IS A NATIVE SPEAKER OF ENGLISH. For more information, please also see the 'English language editing' section below.

6. Spelling

Either British English or US English conventions for spelling and expression should be followed consistently. In words with alternative -ize/-ise spellings, either can be used, consistently throughout the text, but note that if analyze is used, it must be accompanied by US spelling conventions throughout. Please run a spellchecker on the final draft to eliminate detectable typos.

7. Typographic conventions

Please use Times/Times Roman size 12pt font throughout the manuscript. Special typefaces are used as follows:

small capitals
(i) technical terms when first introduced
(ii) section headings
(iii) the names of grammatical categories in the glosses of numbered examples Please use true small caps, not full capitals with a reduced font size.

Italics
(i) language material in the running text
(ii) foreign words
(iii) emphasis in the main body of the text or footnotes
(iv) subsection headings
(v) titles of books, journals and dissertations
(vi) headings in numbered examples (if applicable).

Bold
(i) article title
(ii) emphasis in numbered examples.

‘Single quotation marks’
(i) terms used in a semi-technical sense or terms whose validity is questioned
(ii) meanings of words and sentences
(iii) quotations and ‘direct speech’.

Other special characters:

• "Double quotation marks" - quotations within quotations only.
• & (ampersand) is used instead of the word and before the second/last surname of a co-author or co-editor in references as well as in the main text.
• A ‘long hyphen’ (en-rule –) is used: (i) to mark a ‘dash’ – it is then preceded and followed by a space – and (ii) to mark number spans, such as in page numbers (e.g. 123–54) in the main text as well as in References Please distinguish between a ‘long hyphen’/the en-rule (–) and a short hyphen (-). The em-rule (—) is used only in tables, to mark an empty cell.

8. Quotations

Quotations of under 25 words should be included in single quotation marks in the running text. Any punctuation normally FOLLOWS the closing quotation mark. Longer quotations should be set out as a separate paragraph (or paragraphs) on a new line, indented at the left margin throughout, without any quotation marks and with no extra indent on the first line. The source work and page number must be given for all the quotations. Please check thoroughly against the source the accuracy of the quoted text in the manuscript (wording, punctuation, capitalisation, emphasis) and the page number(s) from which the quotation is taken.

9. Footnotes

Notes should be in the form of footnotes (rather than endnotes) and appear at the bottom of the relevant page. Footnotes should be double-spaced and numbered consecutively, starting from number 1, even if the first footnote contains acknowledgements only. As far as possible, the number and length of footnotes should be kept to an absolute minimum.

10. Numbered examples 

Include all the example numbers and any letters identifying sub-examples in separate parentheses, and align as is shown below, using small word-processor tabs. Example numbering begins at the left margin.

In the article text, examples should be referred to as (4a), (5b, c), (6b–e), (7)–(9) (NOT: (4)a, (5b) and (5c), (6)b–e, (7–9)). Examples in footnotes should be numbered with small roman numerals, also in parentheses, i.e. (i), (ii), etc. Please note the use of a ‘long hyphen’ (en-rule).

11. Examples from languages other than modern English 

Sentences, phrases and words in languages other than modern English which are set out as numbered examples are followed by a line of word-for-word (or morpheme-for-morpheme) gloss and a line of literary translation, all double-spaced. Glosses are fully aligned with the appropriate words or morphemes of the original. The translation is included in single quotation marks and sentence-final punctuation is within the quotation marks. 

All the text in numbered examples is in roman type but if a part of a numbered example is to be highlighted, it is set in bold. Linguistic category labels appearing in the gloss are in SMALL CAPITALS, following Leipzig glossing conventions. The following illustrates:

(4) (a) John likes Mary. (NOT: 4 a., (4) a., etc.)
(b) Mary doesn’t like John.
(c) *Like does Mary John not.

(5) Siroi huku-o kita wakai baaten-ga sutando-no utigawa-ni san-nin
white clothing-ACC wore young bartender-NOM bar-GEN inside-LOC three-CLASS
tatihatariate-iru.
working-be
‘Three young bartenders dressed in white were working behind the bar.’

A translation or a gloss of a non-modern-English example in the running text immediately follows the example at its first occurrence and is enclosed in single quotes; the grammatical category gloss, if present, is given in lower-case roman type in parentheses and within the quotes, e.g. moja matka ‘my mother (nom, 3sg, fem)’.

12. Short references in text

As is shown below, variants of the author-date-page format are used for literature citations depending on the context of the sentence. With more than one work listed, works are ordered chronologically, not alphabetically, unless two or more works by different authors have the same year of publication.

... for arguments against see Smith & Jones (1993: 481–3), Chomsky (1995: 154, 286f.; 1997), Vikner (1995: chapter 5), Rizzi (1997), Iwakura (1999) ...

... and elsewhere (see Seuren 1985: 295–313; Browning 1996: 238, fn. 2) ...

... distinguish certain words from others ‘without having any meaning of its own’ (Hockett 1958: 575).

Please note: (i) the ampersand (&) immediately preceding the surname of the second (or last) co-author; (ii) a space between the colon and the page number; (iii) a ‘long hyphen’ (en-rule) between page numbers; (iv) elliptical page number spans; (v) no space and a full stop, respectively, before and after ff./f.; (vi) NO comma between author’s name and year; (vii) punctuation follows the quotation mark and the quotation source details; (viii) use of 'et al.' permitted for sources with three or more authors ('et al.' is also italicized).

13. References

The style is that of the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics Journals (https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/unified-style-sheet) with the exception that (i) all page numbers are preceded by a comma, i.e. there is a comma rather than a full-stop after journal/proceedings volume number; (ii) page numbers are elided as far as possible except for teens, e.g. 21–4, 121–4 but 112–14; and (iii) dissertation entries specify the university but no ‘place of publication’ separately.

All and only works mentioned in the text and footnotes must be included in the references at the end of the article. Authors should check carefully that this is the case, and that the authors and dates cited match the names and the dates in the references, that the page numbers of all the articles in journals and books are correctly supplied, and that the list is in strict alphabetic order and formatted according to the specification below.

• References start on a fresh page, immediately after the main body of the text. 
• The heading REFERENCES is in capitals and centred, and not in bold. 
• The list is double-spaced throughout. 
• There are no lines or blank spaces for repeated names of authors – the names are always typed as in the first entry. 
• THE FIRST NAMES OF ALL THE AUTHORS AND EDITORS ARE GIVEN IN FULL. This convention must be followed consistently throughout with the exception for those authors who are known to use initials only (e.g. R. M. W. Dixon, S. J. Hannahs). Note that the full first name follows the surname only at the beginning of a new entry. 
• A full-stop separates author name(s) and the year of the publication. 
• If an entry is longer than one line, the second and subsequent lines are indented (‘hanging indent’). 
• In the case of joint authors or editors, list the names in full in the main entry (do not use 'et al.') and use the ampersand (&), not the word ‘and’, before the final name. 
• Please note also a ‘long hyphen’ (en-rule) in number spans and ellipsis of repeated digits (i.e. 1985–91, 134–62; NOT: 1985–1991, 134–162). 
• Abbreviations are to be avoided in the case of journal titles (e.g. English Language and Linguistics, NOT: ELL) but citations from conference proceedings include the meeting’s or the society’s acronym are ok. US state names are given using the standard two-letter abbreviation, e.g. MA (NOT: Mass.). Examples follow below.
• DOIs may be included but are optional. If included, please insert them for all possible references.
• Series names need only be included for more obscure sources, not for readily available texts.

Books
Akmajian, Adrian, Richard A. Demers & Robert M. Harnish. 1985. Linguistics, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kemenade, Ans van & Nigel B. Vincent (eds.). 1997. Parameters of morphosyntactic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kiparsky, Paul & Gilbert Youmans (eds.). 1989. Phonetics and phonology, vol. 1: Rhythm and meter. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Lahiri, Aditi (ed.). 2000. Analogy, leveling, markedness: Principles of change in phonology and morphology (Trends in Linguistics 127). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Luce, R. Duncan, Robert R. Bush & Eugene Galanter (eds.). 1963. Handbook of mathematical psychology, vol. 2. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. 1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pintzuk, Susan, George Tsoulas & Anthony Warner (eds.). 2000. Diachronic syntax: Models and mechanisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Webelhuth, Gert (ed.). 1995. Government and binding theory and the minimalist program: Principles and parameters in syntactic theory (Generative Syntax). Oxford: Blackwell.

Articles in edited volumes, conference proceedings and working papers
If more than one article is cited from a single edited volume, a short reference to the volume appears in the article entries (as in the examples below) and the full details of the volume appear in a separate entry.

Abraham, Werner. 1997. The interdependence of case, aspect, and referentiality in the history of German: The case of the verbal genitive. In van Kemenade & Vincent (eds.), 29–61.

Archangeli, Diana. 1985. Yawelmani noun stress: Assignment of extrametricality. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 6, 1–13.

Casali, Roderic F. 1998. Predicting ATR activity. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society(CLS) 34(1), 55–68.

Clark, Alexander. 2006. Pac-learning unambiguous NTS languages. International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference 8, 59–71. Berlin: Springer.

Del Gobbo, Francesca. 2003a. Appositives and quantification. Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium 26 (University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 9), 73–88.

Hornstein, Norbert & Amy Weinberg. 1995. The Empty Category Principle. In Webelhuth (ed.), 241–96.

Hudson, Richard. 1996. The difficulty of (so-called) self-embedded structures. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 8, 283–314.

Kemenade, Ans van. 2000. Jespersen’s cycle revisited: Formal properties of grammaticalization. In Pintzuk et al. (eds.), 51–74.

Kiparsky, Paul. 1997. The rise of positional licensing. In van Kemenade & Vincent (eds.), 460–94.

Pintzuk, Susan, George Tsoulas & Anthony Warner (eds.). 2000. Diachronic syntax: Models and mechanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rice, Curt. 2006. Norwegian stress and quantity: Gaps and repairs at the phonology–morphology interface. The North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 36(1), 27–38. http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/747-0605/747-RICE-0-0.PDF

Rissanen, Matti. 1999. Syntax. In Roger Lass (ed.), Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 3, 187–331. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, Ian & Anders Holmberg. 2005. On the role of parameters in Universal Grammar: A reply to Newmeyer. In Hans Broekhuis, Norbert Corver, Riny Huybregts, Ursula Kleinhenz & Jan Koster (eds.), Organizing grammar: Linguistic studies in honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, 538–53. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Williams, Edwin. 1995. Theta theory. In Webelhuth (ed.), 97–124.

Willis, David. 2000. Verb movement in Slavonic conditionals. In Pintzuk et al. (eds.), 322–48.

Articles in journals
Iverson, Gregory K. 1983. Korean /s/. Journal of Phonetics 11, 191–200.

Murray, Robert W. & Theo Vennemann. 1983. Sound change and syllable structure in Germanic phonology. Language 59(3), 514–28.

Suñer, Margarita.1988. The role of agreement in clitic-doubled constructions. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 6, 391–434.

Waltereit, Richard. 2020. Parallels between the negative cycle and the rise of interrogative marking in French. Journal of Historical Pragmatics (special issue on 'The Role of pragmatics in cyclic language change' ed. by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen) 21(2), 263–288.

Online papers, reviews, dissertations and other kinds of publication
Ellison. T. Mark & Ewan Klein. 2001. The best of all possible words. Review article on Diana Archangeli & D. Terence Langendoen (eds.), Optimality Theory: An overview, 1997. Journal of Linguistics 37(1), 127–43.

Harley, Heidi. 1995. Subjects, events and licensing. Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusets Institute of Technology.

Joseph, Brian D. 2001. Review of R. M. W. Dixon, The rise and fall of languages, 1997. Journal of Linguistics 37(1), 180–6.

Lattewitz, Karen. 1996. Movement of verbal complements. Ms., University of Groningen.

Pedersen, Johan. 2005. The Spanish impersonal se-construction: Constructional variation and change. Constructions 2, https://constructions.journals.hhu.de/article/view/377 (accessed 10 May 2007).

Schneider, Ulrike & Britta Mondorf. 2015. Moderate transitivity contexts as breeding grounds for novel verbs: An analysis of waxing and waning verbs. Presented at the 36th Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), University of Trier, Germany, 27 – 31 May 2015.

Corpora
Any corpora used in an article should also be included in the references, with a web address where available and the date that you accessed it; corpora should be listed under the name of the compiler where possible – where this is not possible, use a conventional reference. Titles of corpora, like titles of journals, are capitalized.

Davies, Mark. 2008-. The Corpus of Contemporary American English. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca (accessed 1 July 2015).

Huber, Magnus, Magnus Nissel, Patrick Maiwald & Bianca Widlitzki. 2012. The Old Bailey Corpus. https://www.clarin.eu/showcase/old-bailey-corpus-20-1720-1913 (accessed 1 July 2015).

ICE: International Corpus of English http://ice-corpora.net/ice/ (accessed 1 July 2015).

14. Author's contact details

In the final, accepted version, this comes immediately before the references, set on a new page, in the following format (please note the italics and the layout):

Author’s address:
Department
Institution
Full postal details including post or zip code
Country
E-mail: name@domain

15. Artwork

Tables, tree diagrams, tableaux, etc. are usually single-spaced.

• Only horizontal lines are normally used in tables but both horizontal and vertical lines are acceptable in OT tableaux and intricate tables.
• Tree diagrams, tableaux, AVMs and the like are numbered like other examples. Some tables can also be numbered in this way.
• Tables and figures (e.g. graphs and drawings) should appear in their appropriate place in the text, though authors need to be aware that final typesetting may make it necessary for tables or figures to be moved slightly. Tables are labelled above, centered, with the caption in italics. Figures are labelled underneath, centered, with the caption in roman. They should be referred to in the text as ‘table 1’ or ‘figure 1’, not as ‘the figure above’ or ‘the following table’.
• File requirements: Please see the Journal Artwork Guide for more details on how to submit artwork for your manuscript.

16. Keeping track of numbering sequences

If (sub)sections, numbered examples or footnotes are added to or removed from the article in the process of revising it, every care should be taken to ensure that all subsequent (sub)sections, examples or footnotes are appropriately renumbered and that any in-text and in-footnote references to them by numbers (e.g. ‘given the arguments in section 3.2 above’) be checked and adjusted if necessary. While it is acceptable for files to include automatic footnote (i.e. endnote) numbering, please DO NOT use automatic example, figure and table numbering and cross-referencing.

17. Book Reviews: special features

The following special features should be noted for the formatting of book reviews:

Title page. Reviews are headed by (i) the details of the book under review and (ii) the reviewer’s name and affiliation: the latter must be RIGHT-ALIGNED. These details precede the text and have the following exact format, double-spaced; please note the order of information and exact use of punctuation, bold, italics, capital letters and small capitals:

Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou & Martin Everaert (eds.), The unaccusativity puzzle: Explorations of the syntax–lexicon interface (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, 5). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 372. ISBN 9780199257652.

Reviewed by First Name Surname, Institution Name

Referring to chapter titles. When referring to chapter titles, or the titles of individual papers in an edited volume, the following EXACT format for punctuation should be used:

I turn now to chapter 3, ‘Syntactic variation in English: A global perspective’, which is an excellent summary ...

The first paper in the volume is by Kim Blogg, entitled ‘Syllable structure in Klingon’, and this proposes ...

Note that the initial letter of both the title and the subtitle of the chapter or paper are in capitals, and that the title appears in single quotation marks (not in italic or bold font). Note also that lower case ‘c’ is used when referring to chapters by number. The author’s name (or authors’ names) must be given in full at first mention.

References. References should be kept to a minimum. As a rule of thumb, there should be no more than eight references in a 3,000-word review and no more than five in a shorter review. The review editor may cut longer lists. 

References start on a new page, headed REFERENCES (in capital letters, centred). The list must be double-spaced throughout. Please see Section 12 above for style details.

Footnotes. Only in exceptional circumstances will a review contain footnotes. If present, notes must be formatted as described in Section 10, above.

18. Review Articles: special features

Title page. Review Articles must have their own title as well as category heading. The details of the book under review are typed on the front page, which has the following format:

REVIEW ARTICLE
Tracking the origins of transformational generative grammar
BARBARA C. SCHOLZ & GEOFFREY K. PULLUM
University of Edinburgh

Marcus Tomalin, Linguistics and the formal sciences: The origins of generative grammar (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 110). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 233. ISBN 9780521066488.

In-text references to the book under review. The name of a single author or editor of the book under review is to be given in full at each mention, rather than abbreviated. However, the names of two or more authors or editors may be abbreviated thus: ‘Chomsky & Halle 1968 (henceforth C&H)’. Please note the use of the ampersand (&) and the lack of spaces in the abbreviation. 

Alternatively, the book under review may be referred to by an abbreviation of the title, e.g. ‘The book The origins of complex language by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy (henceforth OCL)’. Please note that the abbreviation is in italics.

Page references. Page references to passages in or quotations from the book under review are given in parentheses, e.g. (p. 39). Please note that the full stop immediately follows the page reference if this appears at the end of a sentence, thus: ‘the author notes that "the problem becomes traceable"’ (p. 39).

Last updated: 01 March 2024