The guidelines for Glossa Contact submissions consist of the style sheet that regulates the manuscript structure and typesetting required, and the guidelines for supplementary material (if any). These guidelines are not onerous, but should be followed already at the first submission.

The journal provides a LibreOffice template that will make complying with the Stylesheet easier. We also provide an MS Word exported version of the template. In the near future, we will also provide a Latex template. When using our templates is not possible, we will ask the author upon acceptance to provide their article's text in plain text (that is, a .txt file), which can then be imported into the respective template. 

Style sheet

A Glossa Contact main article consists of a title; an author list; an abstract; the main text divided into numbered sections; a sequence of unnumbered endmatter sections following the main text; and the reference list. The specific requirements are listed below. 

The initial submission does not have to follow the Stylesheet. However, please read Section 1 of the Stylesheet before submitting: it contains important information, some of which you will have to share with us during the submission process. 

For your convenience, Glossa Contact provides a LibreOffice template, and will in the near future also provide a Latex template. You can also use the MS-Word version of the template, although we do recommend using LibreOffice instead. Using one of our templates will make complying with the Stylesheet easier. The way the document looks to you would also be closer to what you will see when the article is published. 

For Latex editing, you may use Overleaf, an easy-to-use online editing system that does not require any program to be installed on your computer. Overleaf works well with a free account, and provides good online help pages for Latex beginners. LibreOffice is a free, open-source office suite, featuring a text editor largely analogous to commercial software like MS Word. Commercial office suites often use closed, proprietary document formats (for example, this is the case with the current MS Word.) LibreOffice works together with the Document Liberation Project. Glossa Contact considers the movement for free, open-source office applications an important counterpart to the movement for open-access academic publishing.

The style sheet of Glossa Contact is based on the stylesheet of Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, version from October 2021 by Waltraud Paul and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, which in turn was based on the The Generic Style Rules for Linguistics (version of December 2014), developed under a CC-BY licence by Martin Haspelmath. The stylesheet of Glossa Contact, however, features several important differences (the authors familiar with the Glossa stylesheet from Oct 2021 can check this list of differences). 

1. Parts of the text

1.1 Front matter

The title should not contain any capitalisation, apart from the first word and words that require capitals in all contexts. The title should not have a period at the end. 

In the submitted version, no author information should be present at the title page or in the submission as the whole, to ensure blind review. This includes author-identifying information. When you need to cite your previous work, you can either (i) do it without identifying yourself, e.g., “Persona (2021) has argued” rather than “I/we have argued in Persona (2021)”, or (ii) refer to your work as AUTHOR (YEARX), and make sure the reference in the reference list does not include any information allowing the reader to identify the publication . Option (i) is preferable, because option (ii) does not allow the reviewers to actually check how the present submission is related to the earlier work you cite. 

In the accepted version, the title is followed by the author list, with each author starting at a new line. For each author, provide their first and last name(s)); their affiliation(s), in the following format: organization (if any), city/town/village/region (whichever more appropriate), country; the author’s email. For your first name(s), use the fullest form that you use; e.g., if you normally present yourself as Anna Barbara, do not abbreviate it to A.B., but if you normally present yourself as A.B. or AB, use that form. The author's name is in boldface; the affiliation is in regular font; the email has the corresponding hyperlink on it. 

The order of the author list is determined by the authors themselves. The baseline is alphabetical order, with equal responsibility (see also Authorship policy). If you want to use a different name order, use also the endmatter "Author contributions" for spelling out the respective contributions.

Next in the front matter is an abstract of 100-250 words summarising the main arguments and conclusions of the article. It should be self-contained. If you must include citations in the abstract, provide information fully identifying the publication; this could be a DOI (for newer publications that have one) or an in-text reference (for older publications). For example, “I use primary data from Eastern Armenian (Indo-European; Caucasus) to show that the empirical predictions about X by Linguist (1998) (Cited Lingustics Journal, 43:2, 1-17) are not borne out”. If you name a language in the abstract, please use the format just illustrated, with the language family and the region in parentheses after the language's name. 

Further, list up to six keywords. It is obligatory at Glossa Contact to provide keywords. Choosing them, bear in mind that their primary purpose is to help the possible readers to determine that your article is relevant for one of their interests (for example, when searching by a keyword in a research database). 

1.2. Main text and division into sections

Articles start with the section header for section 1. They are thus fully subdivided into numbered sections (there is no initial text before the first section header). It is possible to add subsections, numbered 1.1 etc., and subsubsections, numbered 1.1.1 etc. 

The formatting of headers is ensured by the Latex and LibreOffice templates. Do not change the formatting manually: use instead the Latex commands \section etc., or apply the Heading styles provided in the LibreOffice template (Heading 2 for sections, Heading 3 for subsections, etc.) 

Just as the manuscript’s title, section headings do not end with a period, and have no special capitalization. 

The conclusion is the last numbered section. 

The names of the sections are chosen by the author(s), there is no prescribed sequence of sections, other than the first section should introduce the subject, and the last section should offer concluding remarks. 

1.3. End matter 

The main text of the article is followed by unnumbered sections, in the order below. The unnumbered sections are typeset in a smaller font size. (Please do not change this manually; use the provided LibreOffice and Latex templates and follow the guidelines there.) 

• Acknowledgements: an optional section. 

  Any acknowledgements, other than those of funding institutions, must be placed into this section. See also Glossa Contact’s Authorship policy for more information. 

   

• Author contributions: an optional section for multi-authored articles.

  This can be as simple as "X and Y share equal responsibility for this article". For more complex cases, we provide guidance below.

  First, refer to Glossa Contact’s authorship policy for determining who should be listed as an author. To help you with writing a clear and informative author contribution statement, you can (but are not required to) use the CRediT contributor role taxonomy, as described by Amy Brand and coauthors here; see Brand et al’s Table 1 for the roles and definitions. The CRediT system of contribution acknowledgement is increasingly adopted as the required standard in some scientific fields. Note however that according to Glossa Contact’s authorship policy, contributing in a single role would not automatically qualify a person for authorship.

  You can use the full names or the initials (when this is unambiguous) to refer to the individual authors. For transparency and appropriate credit, you may list here also crucial contributions from those not on the author list. Provide their full names. You can organize the list of contributions by task (e.g., “Writing the first draft: AB, CD”) or by author (e.g., “AB: conceptualizing the research, writing the first draft (lead), review of the final manuscript”).  

   

• Abbreviations: obligatory if any abbreviations are used. 

  Divided into (i) a list of glossing abbreviations, which must include all morpheme glosses used, including common ones such as NOM=nominative; and (ii) a list of other abbreviations. For the rules applying to abbreviations, see Section 7f below. 

   

• Data accessibility statement: obligatory when the article introduces new data into the scholarly literature. 

  See Glossa Contact’s data policy. The Data accessibility statement either provides a way to identify the data deposited openly, or briefly explains why data sharing is not appropriate in this particular case. 

  During the submission process, it is the authors' responsibility to ensure that the deposited data are anonymized, not allowing to identify the author. For the OSF data repository, you can consult the guidance for how to achieve that here. Upon acceptance, links and DOIs for the data should be added in the published version, allowing the readers to find and access the data. 

   

• Ethics and consent: an obligatory section.

  For some articles, this may be as simple as, for example, "Ethical considerations do not apply", or "All data used in this article are taken from published sources". Otherwise refer to Glossa Contact’s ethical oversight guidelines. This section must describe the steps undertaken to comply with those. When no guidelines apply, this section consists of a statement confirming that fact. 

   

• Funding information: obligatory if funding was used to conduct the research and write the article. 

  If the article was supported financially by any institution, this should be acknowledged in this section, including the grant or award number where applicable. This serves as an expression of gratitude and an acknowledgement of the funder’s contribution to science, but also in the interest of transparency. 

   

• Supplementary material: obligatory if there is supplementary material. 

  This section describes the supplementary material of the paper, with hyperlinks for easier reference. The description should help the readers of the main text to identify which relevant information is included in the supplementary, and where exactly to find it. 

   

• Competing interests: an obligatory section. 

  Glossa Contact adopts the guidelines on competing interests by the Open Library of Humanities, adopted also by Glossa: a journal of general linguistics and Glossa Psycholinguistics. Those simple guidelines explain how to declare the presence or absence of competing interests. 

 

After the competing interests section, the bibliographical reference list follows, under the header References. See Section 6 on the style of the reference list.

2. Linguistic examples, other numbered statements, formulae, and similar material

2.1. Linguistic examples

Linguistic examples may be given in the running text or as separate numbered items, with glosses and translation following the example on separate lines. Please use the provided templates for formatting the numbered examples. 

Regardless of the mode of presentation, examples from languages other than English must be translated. The translation can be idiomatic or literal; both may be combined, which is encouraged when this facilitates comprehension. Numbered examples should in general also be glossed, and the glossing should follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules. (An example may be exempt from the glossing requirement if its grammatical structure is irrelevant to the role it plays in the article, and glossing it would put an unreasonable amount of work upon the authors, for instance when the example consists of a long paragraph or a long dialogue. ) 

It should be clear which language each example is from. When the article discusses multiple languages, this can be ensured by listing the language on a separate line at the beginning of the example (as e.g. in the illustrating examples in the Leipzig Glossing Rules). The gloss lines have no capitalization and no punctuation. 

If the example comes from a specific literary text, a corpus, or otherwise has an origin that is in principle identifiable, information sufficient to identify the example must be provided. (This could be a reference to the page of a specific historical manuscript; an ID within a corpus; or other such unambiguous references.)

The authors are free to add further details about their examples as they see fit (e.g., the region of origin, the year of origin, the extra-linguistic context, etc.) 

Ungrammatical examples follow the same rules as grammatical examples. They can be provided with an intended translation when the authors find it helpful. 

You may use italics, boldface and small caps in the examples as you see appropriate. (For instance, you can put the word of interest and its gloss into boldface to draw the reader’s attention to it.) However, do not use color as a sole marker of emphasis: 

2.2. Other numbered statements

The authors can add further numbered statements, including formulations of empirical generalizations, hypotheses or proposed laws, mathematical formulae, and other material as appropriate. 

The authors are free to implement a consistent numbering and cross-referencing of such statements, when using a common numbering with the linguistic examples impedes readability. In Latex, automatic numbering and cross-referencing should always be used. In LibreOffice, the authors are responsible for double-checking the correctness of numbering and cross-referencing. 

When using mathematical formulae, it is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that those appear correctly in the submission and in the proofs. 

2.3. Numbering and cross-referencing 

Although the reviewers and editors will comment upon, and copyeditors will attempt to correct mistakes in cross-referencing, it is the authors’ responsibility to check the proofs before the final publication and make sure that the cross-referencing is correct. 

Latex ensures automatic and correct numbering and cross-referencing and examples. Mistakes in reference labels are diagnosed at compilation and can be looked up by the authors (when using Overleaf, you can check them in Logs and other outputs). 

Text editors such as LibreOffice Writer or MS Word do not provide such simple and robust referencing. The authors need to manually number and manually reference. This often leads to mistakes when portions of the text are revised and the numbering consequently changes. The authors using the LibreOffice template therefore must exercise particular care and attention with numbering and referencing.

3. Use of footnotes and endnotes

Use footnotes and not endnotes. Footnotes appear at the bottom of each page. Footnotes should be used only where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed.

Do not use footnotes for purposes of referencing, with in-text citations used instead (and the full reference accordingly appearing in the final reference list).

The footnote reference number normally follows a period or a comma, though exceptionally it may follow an individual word. Add the footnote after, not before the punctuation mark. Footnote numbers start with 1. Examples in footnotes have the numbers (i), (ii), etc., starting anew in each footnote.

4. Tables and figures

4.1. General guidelines for tables and figures

Tables and figures are numbered with arabic numbers, consecutively, with two separate numberings for tables and for figures. Within a single figure, you can designate sub-figures with small roman letters.

Each table or figure should have a caption, which starts with “Table N.” or “Figure N.” in boldface, where N stands for the number. The caption should briefly explain the figure and its significance for the article’s argument. Bear in mind that a blind person reading your article would not be able to see the figure itself, but will have access to the caption. The caption runs in the regular font, is aligned on both edges, and ends with a full stop.

In LibreOffice, use the button “insert a caption” from the drop-down menu. This will also ensure consecutive numbering. Change the separator into the full stop. In Latex, use the command \caption within the table of figure environment.

Tables and figures will be treated as “floats”. Generally, text will not be wrapped around them, they will occupy the full width of the text area of the page. They will be normally positioned at the top or the bottom of the page, or on a separate page. During typesetting, Glossa Contact will try to follow your positioning of the floats in the final submitted version as much as possible. In LibreOffice, you can anchor your figure or the text frame with your table to a specific paragraph or to a specific page. In Latex, you can use the specifications [htbp]. However, it is not guaranteed that your figure or table will appear at the exact position where you put it in the submitted draft. Therefore, please always refer to the tables and figures as, e.g., “...in Figure 2a, ...”, rather than with “...in the figure above/below/on the previous page...”

4.2. Figures

In addition to placing the figure image within your manuscript, please save the original image file, and submit it as a supplementary file if the article is accepted. Your figures should be readable when printed, and generally should have the dpi of at least 300 if in raster graphics. Generally acceptable formats include .png, .jpg/.jpeg, .tiff, .gif, .eps.

When preparing your figures, please consider how they will look like to a person with atypical vision. You can use Color Oracle, a free vision-simulator tool available for all major operating systems. Color Oracle will show to you how your figures appear to, for example, a person with deuteranopia. 

Please also write your captions so that a blind person might use the caption to understand at least the main point of your figure, if this is at all possible. 

LibreOffice: Do not use the Link option when inserting an image into your submission file.

Latex: use the figure environment for the figure as a whole, including the caption, and the \includegraphics command for the image itself. See here and here for more information.

4.3. Tables

There is no prescribed schema for which cell borders in the table should be shown by a line or a double line. Ensuring the intended effect is the authors’ responsibility. If the article is accepted, please check carefully the table’s appearance when checking the proofs.

Latex: use the float environment table. You can specify the preferred position of your table. Use \caption{} for the caption.

LibreOffice: you must create a Text frame, then insert a table into it. Otherwise it will not be possible to later move your table efficiently. You can anchor the text frame with the table to a paragraph or to a page. Unlike with figures, you will need to type in the caption as a separate paragraph under the table, with the appropriate formatting.

5. In-text citations

Glossa Contact uses APA-style in-text citations, namely the forms “(von Humboldt, 1828)” and “von Humboldt (1828)”. Use the former, the so-called parenthetical style, to refer to the work; use the latter, the so-called narrative style, to refer to the author making a specific argument, which was presented in the work.

When there are multiple authors, use the ampersand (i.e. &) to separate author names. If there are more than two authors, you can replace the later authors in the list with “et al.” for briefness.

If you want to refer to a particular page, section, chapter, etc., do it like this: (Author, Year: PageNumber-PageNumber) or (Author, Year: Ch. 2).

When you cite several works in a row, put them into single brackets, and separate with semicolons. E.g., (von Humboldt, 1828; Bopp, 1816).

For complex surnames, such as “von Humboldt” or “de Saussure”, Glossa Contact does not prescribe how to refer to them. E.g., both “de Saussure” and “Saussure” are acceptable, but need to be consistent throughout your manuscript.

In Latex, use Bibtex to generate the bibliography and the form of in-text citations automatically, based on a .bib file that you will need to prepare. For in-text citations in Latex, use \citet to get "von Humboldt (1828)" and use \citep to get "(von Humboldt, 1828)". 

6. References after the main text

In the reference list, all and only works cited in the main text are provided. If it is customary in your subfield to divide your reference list (e.g., into the primary sources and the secondary works), this is allowed. Use subsection-level headers for names of the sublists. 

References should be formatted according to the APA bibliography style, with one required exception: authors' first names should always be given in full form (when at all known), rather than abbreviated to the initials as APA prescribes. Other deviations from the APA style are allowed when they follow established practice in some subfield (for example, it is acceptable to cite a doctoral dissertation using "PhD dissertation" rather than the APA-prescribed "Unpublished doctoral dissertation", and we usually do not italicize the journal's volume as in the APA). If a deviation from the APA recommendations is important for you and not mentioned here, please comment on this when you submit the final files for typesetting. 

Whenever a DOI exists, it should be added to the reference, to make it easier to locate the publication. 

If you use LibreOffice and the free bibliography tool Zotero, you can use the Zotero style prepared for Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. 

If you use Latex, the references are formatted automatically once you supply your reference database as a .bib file. Use glossa_contact.bst supplied with the Latex template. See, for example, here for more information. A non-trivial detail: do not forget to "protect" the words that need to always contain uppercase by {} in the .bib file (e.g., write "Investigating {SVO}", not "Investigating SVO"). 

7. Typographical matters

a. 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. Capitalization is also used after the colon in titles, i.e. for the beginning of subtitles.

Use the capital when referring to a table, figure, section, e.g., "as shown in Table 5".

b. Italics

Italics are used in the following cases:

• for all object-language forms (letters, words, phrases, sentences) that are cited within the text, unless they are phonetic transcriptions or phonological representations in IPA
• for technical terms (e.g., "on the parole side", when referring to Saussure's concept of parole)
• for expressions from so-called classical languages, e.g., ad hoc
• for emphasis

When using emphasis within a quotation, please indicate whether emphasis was added in the original or by the present authors.

c. Small caps

Use small caps for the interlinear morpheme glosses in examples.

Do not use small caps for emphasis within the main text (use italics instead).

You may use small caps for indicating object-language emphasis within linguistic examples; e.g., for indicating that a word carries special prosodic prominence in its sentence.

d. Boldface

Do not use boldface for emphasis in the main text (use italics instead).

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. Please use boldface rather than small caps or underlining for such highlighting within examples.

e. Quotation marks

Single quotation marks are used exclusively for linguistic meanings, e.g., Latin habere ‘have’ is not cognate with Old English hafian ‘have’.

Double quotation marks are used when a passage from another work is cited in the text. Ellipsis in a quotation is indicated by [...]. 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).

f. 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”). Please refrain from using abbreviations if it is reasonable to do so, as these are not necessarily shared by scholars from different subfields, and may make it harder for them to follow your argument.

An abbreviation in the main text should be deabbreviated in the text when it is first used, and also added to the end-matter section Abbreviations.

Abbreviations for morpheme meanings in glosses do not need to be deabbreviated in the text, but need to be added in the list of glosses within the end-matter section Abbreviations

8. Reference to languages

When you refer to a language for the first time (in the abstract, in the main text or in the supplementary), add “(language family, primary geographic region(s), glottocode X)” after the language name. For example: “Amharic (Ethio-Semitic, Ethiopia, glottocode amha1245)”. This identifying information may be omitted when the article’s context makes it clear in another way e.g. which language family the languages discussed belong to. (For example, if you article concerns multiple Arawakan languages and you name the Arawakan family already in the article’s title, it may not make sense to add the family information for each language at first mention.)

• For languages that have many possible designations, Glossa Contact does not have an official policy dictating to the authors which name to use. This is your choice. However, we recommend when making this choice, you reflect on the power of naming, especially when the language in question is spoken by a historically or presently disadvantaged community. We also recommend adding a footnote at the first mention of the language to briefly explain why you chose the particular designation that you use, and lists other alternative names for this language.
• When several levels of family designation are possible, choose the most sensible one given your article’s context, or include several (e.g., rather than “Uralic”, you can write “the Komi sub-branch of the Permian branch of the Uralic family”).
• When designating a primary region or regions does not make sense, omit that.
• Glottocodes can be looked up on Glottolog, the open-access reference on the languages of the world.

Main differences between the stylesheets of Glossa (version Oct 2021) and Glossa Contact

1. At Glossa Contact, we provide Latex or LibreOffice templates to be used by the authors. We also provide suggestions for both LibreOffice and Latex users throughout the stylesheet. 
2. Our instructions for the front matter (section 1.1) are more detailed.
3. Glossa Contact has different rules for some end-matter unnumbered sections. In particular, more such sections are obligatory or conditionally obligatory, but we provide guidance as to how to fill them in easily in the simple cases. 
4. For figures, Glossa Contact strongly advises using Color Oracle for checking if your visualizations will be understandable for people with atypical vision. We also highly recommend writing figure captions that can explain the main point of a figure to a blind reader. 
5. Glossa Contact has a section on how to refer to specific languages (section 8 of the stylesheet).

There are further small differences between the two stylesheets; for example, Glossa Contact's stylesheet allows for more flexibility when referring to authors with complex surnames such as "von Humboldt". See Sections 5 and 6 above. 

Guidelines for supplementary material

Supplementary material enhances the article by providing further data or information. It can take the form of supplementary text as well as of various data files. The supplementary is submitted together with the manuscript for review. It does not have to follow the Stylesheet's requirements, although it is advisable to use, for example, the same format for citations as for the main article. The supplementary will be published as is upon acceptance, so please proof-read it very carefully when submitting the final version of the article. It will be published under the same CC BY 4.0 license as the main article.