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This document provides guidance for the writing of term papers and final theses in English Linguistics. It considers content-related aspects as well as formal requirements and recommendations, and issues of data presentation. It thus covers diverse aspects of writing conventions in linguistics and beyond, often at a considerable level of detail in order to be fully instructive. You should not feel discouraged by this. Adhering to all details of the present guidelines consistently will amount to more than just a solid quality of formatting and structure (required for passing an exam); it will yield an excellent quality close to professional publication standards.


Introduction
In this section, we highlight a few points that will be developed in more detail below. When writing a paper, you should constantly bear these in mind, particularly before the final revision. If your paper meets the general description given in Section 1.1, it will likely be a success.

What a term paper or thesis in linguistics is about
In the term paper or thesis, you are supposed to show that you can apply your knowledge of linguistic facts, theories and methodologies to a concrete research topic. This involves (i) the identification and formulation of a sensible research question or hypothesis, (ii) motivating your research question based on what you know about language and linguistic theories, (iii) supporting your topic with an appropriate selection of literature, (iv) choosing and justifying a methodological approach to your analysis, (v) presenting your results, and (vi) discussing your results against the background of your initial questions and hypotheses.
In addition, you need to structure and present your entire paper in such a way that it is accessible, easy to follow, and conforms to certain formal requirements.
Like term papers, final theses can be based on or inspired by the content of a particular seminar or lecture, but you can also follow your own interests. To find a suitable supervisor for your topic, have a look at the institute website, where members of the Linguistics Department list their personal research interests, then get in touch with them. Also have a look at the document "Themenvorschläge für Abschlussarbeiten" ('Suggested topics for BA/MA theses'). The idea is not to simply copy those topics, but the list can provide general inspiration.

What is important in a paper or thesis
Your paper should have a clearly defined, reasonably specific topic, typically with a research question, perhaps even with a certain expectation or hypothesis. Specific questions or hypotheses are normally not part of the title, but need to be stated clearly in the introduction. Bear in mind the difference between a general research area and a specific, more focused research topic. Your paper needs to be specific, even if you contextualise it within a broader area, and the title of your paper should reflect this.
Your paper should have a transparent, motivated, balanced and easy-to-follow general structure. The overall architecture of the paper needs to be such that it maximally supports the topic or research objective. As you write, you need to be confident that all the parts you include in your paper are necessary and serve a purpose, that they are arranged in a sensible sequence, that they have the right proportions, and that they communicate with each other, as far as appropriate. If you catch yourself writing merely in order to fill pages or reach the word limit, take this as a warning sign. These aspects will be discussed in more detail in Section 2.
In your paper, you should respect certain formal conventions and present content in a tidy and relatively standard way. This concerns the general layout of the paper, the numbering of figures, tables, and -very importantly -providing references for works cited in your paper. These aspects are covered in depth in Sections 2.8 and 4.
Papers in linguistics will usually have an empirical component. That is, you will inspect linguistic evidence (data) in order to answer your research questions, or confirm or reject your hypotheses. Section 3.4 will provide a few recommendations on how to illustrate results of empirical investigations.

What is not important in a paper or thesis
A common fallacy is to assume that you must come up with something that is spectacularly new or original. This is not required -even professional linguists often contribute to existing research in a relatively modest, incremental way, e.g. by taking a slightly different perspective on a well-known problem, refining an existing theory or testing someone else's results against a new dataset. Do not waste your time looking for something nobody ever did before. However, if you do have a truly original idea, by all means go ahead! Your responsibility is to take your academic paper through all the required stages in the appropriate way. It is not your responsibility to produce exciting results that support your hypothesis or answer your research question in a straightforward way. You may be disappointed if results are inconclusive or even directly run counter to what you expected, but this, too, is valuable evidence.

Length
Term papers should have a length of approximately 10 pages, if you follow the guidelines concerning page layout described in Sections 3.1 and 3.2. You can find up-to-date information concerning the length of MA-and BA-theses here. If you are studying for the Staatsexamen (Lehramt), the length of your final thesis depends on your exact degree (Gymnasium: approx. 60 pages; Mittelschule/Sonderpädagogik: approx. 50 pages; Grundschule: approx. 40 pages).
The page count includes all text from the introduction to (and including) the conclusion, also including tables, figures and formulas. It excludes the cover page, the table of contents, the bibliography, appendices and the affidavit. You should in any case provide the exact number of words of your paper or thesis at the bottom of the last page of the main text.

Term papers
We encourage the submission of terms papers in a digital format, sent by email. Please check with your instructor if they require a hard copy in addition to a pdf-file. In this case, the hard copy needs to be identical to the digital copy. Please do not staple the pages together or use plastic folders. See further information in the examination regulations ('Prüfungsordnung').

BA/MA theses
You need to submit two printed copies and two identical digital copies (e.g. CDs) of your thesis to the examination office ('Prüfungsamt'). Further instructions can be found in the documents "Hinweise zur Bachelor/Master-Arbeit" ('information concerning BA/MA theses') and the examination regulations ( § 19 Prüfungsordnung für den Bachelorstudiengang/Masterstudiengang Anglistik an der Universität Leipzig). In addition, you should send an identical digital version to you supervisors.

Wissenschaftliche Arbeit (State Board Examination / Lehramt)
You need to submit one printed and bound and one digital copy (on a CD or USB drive) of your thesis to the LaSuB and two printed copies and two digital copies (in this case as an email attachment) to your supervisors; see further instructions in the examination regulations for teacher training programmes ( § 11 Lehramtsprüfungsordnung/LAPO I). Digital copies must be identical to hard copies.

Cases of illness during the writing process
Should you fall ill whilst writing your paper, it is advisable to contact your supervisors. If you are writing a term paper or BA/MA thesis, you must submit your original doctor's certificate to the examination office ('Prüfungsmanagement') and submit a copy of the certificate along with the paper. If you are writing your final thesis as a teacher trainee, you must send your application for an extension along with your original doctor's certificate to the LaSuB and, once the extension is granted, submit a copy of the certificate along with the thesis.

Before you start
Before you even begin writing your paper, you should familiarize yourself with the tools you are using. In modern word processors like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer (and also typesetting tools like LaTeX), there are many helpful functions that can assist you. For instance, instead of setting the typeface or the line spacing by hand, make use of pre-defined formatting styles ('Formatvorlagen'). This not only ensures that the layout of your paper is consistent, but it also makes it possible to generate the table of contents automatically. Once set up, you can re-cycle your styles for future papers (and with relatively small changes also for papers in other subjects).

Proofreading
Do not forget to thoroughly proofread your paper, or even better, have someone else proofread it for you. Spellcheckers will never find all mistakes, and a proofreader may also give you important hints concerning style or terminology. Even a well-researched paper will appear sloppy and amateurish if sprinkled with typos and grammar mistakes.

Content and general structure
Any (empirical) academic paper or thesis minimally consists of the following parts in the given order.
Title page (Section 2.1) In some cases, you might need to add an appendix (see Section 2.8), which is then inserted between the references and the affidavit and should be listed in the table of contents. In final theses, you may also want to provide a list of figures, a list of tables and a list of abbreviations, all of which are then inserted between the table of contents and the introduction and should be listed in the table of contents.

Title page
The (unnumbered) title page -or cover page -specifies the context in which the paper was written, states the title and provides information about the author, i.e. you. There are minor differences between term papers and final theses, as outlined below. Figure 1 shows what kind of information needs to be given on the title page of a term paper. Note that this is a miniature example merely intended to indicate the position of content.
Title pages for final theses look very similar but differ in three points: (i) In the top left corner, instead of module, seminar, instructor and semester you simply state the two supervisors; (ii) immediately preceding the title, you need to specify the type of thesis, in the same font size, centred, but non-italic (e.g. "MA thesis", "BA thesis"); and (iii) in the bottom right corner, you do not need to state your semester of study.

Table of contents
The table of contents is also on an unnumbered page and directly follows the title page. It lists all the chapters/sections of the paper with their respective page numbers, starting either with the introduction or any lists (e.g. of figures or tables) that precede it. The first numbered section should always be the introduction; references, appendices and the affidavit are listed but not part of the numbered chapter structure, as shown in Figure 2. Again, note that the ratio of page size and text is not realistic in the example. A

Introduction
The introduction of an academic paper is supposed to prepare the reader for the topic of the paper and give a brief outlook on what you are going to discuss and in which way you approach the topic. Essentially, it should give the reader a clear idea of what to expect and why to be interested.
You should therefore provide answers to the following questions:  What is the general research area, and, within this, what is the more specific focus of your work?  What is the main leading question you are going to answer in your paper? (You should be able to summarize this question in one sentence.)  If there are any: What are your expectations or hypotheses?  What is the theoretical background of the paper? (Theories need to be explained in more detail in the main part of the paper, but do state them in general terms here.)  What is your methodological approach, what data will you use? (Without going into too much detail here...)  What is the structure of your paper?
The exact nature of your data (e.g. corpora, sound files, comments collected in online forums, etc.) and methods (e.g. corpus analyses, acoustic analysis, statistical test, etc.) need to be explained in detail in the respective chapters in the main part of the paper, but in the Introduction you should give the reader a rough idea.

Main part (Body)
The structure of the main part of your paper largely depends on the length of the submission, the approach, methodology, and goals of the paper and the research topic; it should therefore be tailored to the individual submission. It makes a big difference whether you write an empirical paper (based on language data) or an argumentative/theoretical paper. The individual sections below mainly focus on the empirical type of paper.
When your work is based on empirical data, there will usually be a section describing the methodology you used and at least one section in which you present and discuss the results. The discussion of the results may also take place in the conclusion (see 2.4.3).
Non-empirical papers may have a different structure. Please talk to your supervisor for more information.
When writing the main part of your paper, pay attention to the following points:  Be coherent: There should be clear links between paragraphs and chapters, so that each builds upon the previous and the relations that hold between different parts of the paper are clear. Within sections, this can be supported by conjuncts such as therefore, moreover, on the other hand, etc.  Be concise: Discuss only what is relevant to your leading question(s) and do not get side-tracked by matters like biographical information about a linguist, unnecessary historical detail, or funny occurrences during your data collection. 1 Do not let data and quotations speak for themselves. Both are no more than the means that help you to argue your point, so tell your reader to what extent they support your hypothesis and which conclusions you draw from them. You may be aware of what things mean, but your reader(s) may need more guidance.  Chapter headings should support your linguistic narrative. They should be short and precise, i.e. they should not suggest more to the reader than what is actually dealt with in the respective part. Also avoid overly general headings such as "Chapter 1" or "Main Part" and do not use the title of your whole paper as a chapter heading.

Research background
Depending on the scope of the topic and the length of the paper, the research background for your paper may be presented in a relatively simple chapter, a chapter subdivided into several subchapters, or even in more than one chapter.
Neither the methodology nor the data are described in this part (see 2.4.2).
In everything you do here, choose what is relevant and contributes to answering your leading research question. Quote the most important pieces of information, summarize different authors' arguments and express your own well-founded thoughts on them. Do not try to be comprehensive: If some piece of previous work fits your general topic but takes a completely different methodological approach, or uses completely different data and thus does not easily compare to what you have in mind, you can explain very briefly why you do not discuss those sources in detail.

Data and Methods
In this section, you should enable the reader to understand and evaluate how you arrived at your results:  Specify the source of your data, how you retrieved them, and explain their structure and quality.  Describe your method of analysis (e.g. annotation of corpus material, annotation of sound files, categorisation of responses given in a survey on language attitudes, quantification and perhaps statistical analysis of results etc.).  Be transparent and clear, and do not keep silent about shortcomings and aspects that turned out to be problematic. Ideally, a reader will be able to replicate the same study, if they are given access to your data source, and they will also be able to adapt your method to their specific needs.
The order of the "Method" and "Data" parts is free, and sometimes the two are closely intertwined, e.g. because a certain method is employed to generate the data in the first place. It therefore makes sense to think about this as a sequence -simply describe the steps you took in your study. It may also make sense to subdivide the chapter into sections such as "Corpora", "Data retrieval and annotation" and "Statistical analysis", or the like.

Results
In a term paper, results can often be presented and discussed in the same chapter. In a thesis, you may wish to have separate chapters for the presentation (or description) of your results and their discussion (or interpretation).
Results can include the following, for example:  the number of times a phenomenon occurred in one type of text compared to another (e.g. in speech vs writing),  the proportion or percentage of a variant -e.g. articulated postvocalic /r/ as opposed to nonrhotic pronunciation -in one group of speakers as compared to another,  the average reading time for one type of sentence (e.g. ambiguous ones) as compared to another type (e.g. non-ambiguous), or  changes in the text frequency of a word or construction over a certain period of time.
Make sure that your results are maximally accessible to readers. Many term papers present numerical evidence (e.g. percentages for different linguistic phenomena and social groups or speakers) purely within the text. This is not wrong, but it will often be difficult to follow -even simple percentages can be very hard to process if there are many of them, and they are embedded in the general narrative! So consider making use of tables and graphs, or a combination of both. Graphs (e.g. generated in Microsoft Excel) are in most cases preferable, but it really depends on the complexity of your results. You can also present easy-to-read graphs in the text and relegate the precise numbers to a table in the appendix.

Discussion
Very importantly, discuss what answers to your research questions are suggested by your results, and also discuss their wider implications for theory, if appropriate. It is here that your paper is beginning to come full circle: Results must connect directly to the research questions and the theoretical chapter(s). It does not hurt to occasionally remind the reader why you are presenting this or that graph or table, and to which part of your topic it contributes.

Conclusion
The concluding chapter presents a concise summary of the entire paper: • Briefly re-state the goals and expectations of your study and the data and method(s) you employed, • summarise your findings, and whether or not they confirmed your expectations or hypotheses, • discuss aspects you may not have been able to discuss, and • if appropriate, give an outlook to open questions that can be addressed in future research.
Remember that the introduction and conclusion form the "frame" of your paper. Their contents should thus match very closely; in other words, you should not promise something in the introduction which you cannot keep in the conclusion.

References
The list of references must contain all the works that you mention in the text in alphabetical order. While the greater omission is to cite a text without listing it here, you should also check that you do not list works that do not actually feature in your text. References are not part of the numbered chapter structure of your paper. The format of the bibliography and the conventions for in-text citations are described in more detail in Section 4.
A common question concerns the number of sources required for a term paper or final thesis. This depends strongly on your topic, and your supervisor can give you advice.

Affidavit
You must abide by the terms of the following affidavit and include it on a separate, signed sheet at the very end of your submission: I hereby certify that the submitted work is wholly my own work, and that all quotations and lines of reasoning from primary and secondary sources have been acknowledged. I further certify that the work has not been submitted previously, in the present or a modified form, including submission in a different language, by myself or any other person. Plagiarism and other unacknowledged debts will be penalised and may lead to failure in the whole examination and degree.

Appendices
Material is optionally included in an appendix if it is too long or elaborate for the main text. Thus, an appendix typically contains supplementary and further illustrative material like sample concordances, stimulus sentences used in an experiment, parts of (or an entire) questionnaire, tables with results that are too detailed to be of use in the main parts of your paper (where you may rely on simplified tables and/or plots).
Appendices provide extra information for readers who want to see more details, and it also further documents the work and thought you have put into your paper. Bear in mind that the main paper still needs to be a complete and convincing piece of work in itself, and readers need to understand your conclusions and arguments without referring to the appendix.

Page layout, indentation and justification
Pages should be in A4 (portrait), with margins of 3 cm on the left and right and 2.5 cm at the top and bottom. The table of contents, the first chapter, the references, the appendix and the affidavit all start on a fresh page.
The text should be justified on both sides ('Blocksatz') and paragraphs should either have their first lines indented by half an inch (1.25 cm), or have a small extra space of about 6 points between them. If you choose to indent the paragraphs, make sure that the first paragraph after a headline does not have such an indentation.
Check for orphans and widows ('Absatzkontrolle'). An orphan is a single line which appears at the bottom of one page, while the rest of the paragraph is on the next page. Avoid widow lines as well, i.e. the last line of a paragraph should not happen to be isolated on the next page.

Fonts, font sizes and line spacing
The standard font is Times New Roman 12 pt. The line spacing ('Zeilenabstand') of your running text should be set to factor 1.5. Longer quotations, footnotes and the list of references should be single-spaced (see Section 4.2.2 for longer quotations).

Numbering of pages and headings
Starting from the Introduction, each page with the exception of the affidavit needs to have a page number in Arabic numerals. If there are lists of tables, figures and abbreviations that intervene between table of contents and first chapter in a longer paper, these are typically counted in small Roman numerals. You can achieve different formats for page numbers by introducing a section break ('Abschnittswechsel') in Word.
Use Arabic numerals for headings (e.g. "2", "2.3" or "5.1.2"). Three levels should be sufficient in term papers, maximally four levels in final theses. If you think you require more than that, you should consider revising the outline of your paper -as a rule of thumb, a subsection should contain more than just a single idea expressed in a single paragraph.
Each lower level in the hierarchy of chapters should at least consist of two headings -for instance, you should not have a single "dangling" subsection 2.1 within chapter 2. Note again that the references section and (optional) appendices do not have numbered headings. For a suggestion as to what the table of contents can look like see Figure 2 in Section 2.2 above.

Tables and figures
You may wish to summarise and illustrate your results with the help of tables and figures. Tables present information in rows and columns. Figures may include graphs, photographs, maps etc. The function of figures and tables is to support what you discuss in the text, not to replace the text. Therefore never just insert the table or figure without discussing them. Do not use both a table and a figure for representing the same data; instead, decide on the more effective illustration.
Tables and figures should be horizontally centred on the page. They must be numbered consecutively and have a caption (title), which is also centred and placed consistently either below or above the table/figure.
When referring to a figure or table in the text, mention the number given in the caption and spell Table and Figure with capital letters, e.g. "cf. Table 1", or "this contrast is shown in Figure  2". Tables should have single line spacing (although some additional space between rows may be appropriate) and avoid vertical lines. See Table 1

Linguistic examples
Linguistic examples (e.g. from corpora, from the literature or of your own making) should be numbered consecutively throughout your paper and may be referred to in the text by means of these numbers. A basic example is shown in (1), where the corpus source (corpus and text identifier) is given in square brackets.
Related examples can be subsumed under a single number and distinguished by adding a letter. This is shown in (3), where the original corpus example is again given with its source, examples derived by the author are given under letters "b" and "c".
( c. I suspect I must adjust something there. In your text you can then refer to the instances listed in (3) as "(3a)", "(3b)" and "(3c)", respectively. Always be explicit about the source of your examples if they are not your own. Instead of the corpus source, as in (1) above, you can also state a publication in which you found the example. This can be seen in (4), which is also maximally transparent about the highlighting italics:

Quotation marks
Use typographically correct quotation marks in your paper. Opening and closing marks in English look like a tiny 6 and a tiny 9 respectively ('…', "…") and are referred to as typographic, curved or curly quotation marks. Do not use what is variously called neutral, vertical, straight or typewriter quotation marks ('…', "…"), nor use German-style quotation marks ("…").
Double quotation marks are used for shorter, direct quotations, and for terminology that you mention but do not intend to use yourself.
Aarts (1988: 40) describes concession as "a fuzzy semantic notion". Quirk et al. (1985Quirk et al. ( : 1036 introduce the term "resolution" when describing complex sentences with the maximally emphasised clause in final position. In this thesis, however, clausal constructions like this are explained via the principle of end-focus. Single quotation marks are used for meanings and definitions (including translations from languages other than English) and quotations within quotations.
The Old English verb sellan had the general meaning of 'give'; Middle English sellen, however, was narrowed to 'sell', that is, 'give for money'.
In the German original, Menzerath (1941: 19) refers to this property of a diphthong as "Eingipfligkeit" ('having a single peak').
Never use quotation marks for emphasis, since a reader is likely to interpret this as irony. For single quotation marks, use the apostrophe, which is found on the same key as the hash sign (#) on a German standard keyboard. Your word processor will normally recognise from the context whether you are using an opening or closing mark, but there are cases in which this goes wrong.

Italics, bold print and underlining
Italics are the main highlighting device. They are used in the following cases: • For marking what is called "object-language forms", i.e. letters, words, phrases or sentences that are cited within your text. This does not apply to whole corpus examples that are indicated and numbered as such (see Section 3.5), or to phonetic or phonological representations that are bracketed accordingly (see Section 3.6.6).
The word catalytic only becomes more frequent in the second half of the twentieth century.
• For the indication of titles of books, journals, or films, and the like: The language of Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting was greeted as a realistic kind of urban Scots by many, but condemned as pure gutter language by some.
• For technical terms that you introduce and specify for use in your work. This only needs to be done once, or if you contrast your use of a term with that of another author: Throughout this thesis, I use the term stylistic variation to denote all kinds of context-dependent variation within a single speech community.
• For emphasis of a particular word that is not a technical term: It is remarkable that the authors found this particular variant in New York City, but only in New York City.
• For emphasis within a quotation, with the indication ["emphasis mine"] or ["my italics"] at the end of the quotation: However, 'Liverpool also continued to do well on the culture front' (Juskan 2018: 21; emphasis mine).
Italics are not used for commonly used loanwords (ad hoc, façon de parler, e.g., et al., Sprachbund, a priori, vis-à-vis). If in doubt as to whether or not some such expression is "commonly used", it might be a good idea to rephrase. If you have to italicize something within a stretch of italics, the type is normally switched back to roman type.
There is typically no need for you to use underlining in your paper, and the same goes for bold print. If you do need to highlight elements at different levels, make sure that you use a consistent system.

Hyphens and dashes
You need to distinguish between hyphens (-) and dashes (-). While hyphens are used to join words or syllables (e.g. twenty-three), dashes indicate parenthetical expressions -such as this one -and ranges of numerical values (e.g. page numbers or percentage ranges in an empirical paper, such as "20-30 years of age"). Dashes used in parenthetical expressions are surrounded by spaces, those indicating a range are not.

IPA characters
If you need to include IPA symbols, make sure to use an appropriate Unicode font that roughly matches the look of your running text. Widely used character sets (e.g. Times New Roman or Cambria) now include all the standard IPA symbols needed for English transcription. In addition, SIL International offers two standard typefaces (Doulos SIL and Charis SIL) that provide well designed, free-of-charge IPA fonts. Do not forget to enclose phonemic transcriptions in slashes /…/ and phonetic transcriptions in square brackets […].
In order to add IPA characters to your document, you can either work directly from Word, using the path Insert > Symbol > Other symbols ('Einfügen > Symbol > Weitere Symbole'). The IPA Character Picker (Ishida 2010) is a helpful online tool for selecting the appropriate IPA symbols, as is the website https://ipa.typeit.org/. Both of these enable you to generate IPA transcriptions online, either by clicking on buttons or using keyboard shortcuts. You can then copy your characters and paste them into Word.

Numbers
As term papers are written in English, you need to use the respective decimal marks (.) and separators for thousands (,) when discussing numbers, as in the second column of Table 2.  Think about how many places after the comma you need to report. Fewer is usually better, but this also depends on the overall magnitude of your numbers. For instance, "31% vs. 42%" is typically good enough; "31.2% vs. 42.1%% is more precise but still rather clear, while "31.24% vs. 42.13%" is unnecessarily precise. According to the Scottish Vowel Length Rule, the vowel in brewed is only long because that particular word can be analysed into {brew} + {past}, and the vowel is therefore positioned immediately before a morpheme boundary.
Square brackets are also used when you make a legitimate (often minimal) change or add a comment to a direct quotation or a corpus example. These cases are explained in Section 4.2 ("In-text citation").

Footnotes
Footnotes can provide additional information that is relevant in the given context but not of central importance to understanding your argument. You should use them sparingly, particularly in a term paper, and consider in each case whether they should not rather be incorporated into the main text or left out altogether.
You should ask yourself two questions: (i) Is this information important and interesting enough to be stated, and (ii) would including the information in the text distract the reader from what you mainly want to say? If the answer is "yes" to both questions, you can add a footnote.

Citations, referencing and plagiarism
Our guidelines for referencing closely follow the Unified Style Sheet of the Linguistic Society of America.

General remarks
Knowing how and what to cite is essential when writing an academic paper. Failure to use references and citations correctly not only withholds important information from your readers, but can even result in charges of plagiarism and academic dishonesty. It is therefore vital that you present correct and complete information on the sources you use.
There are different ways of documenting cited material. The method presented here is one of the most commonly used in linguistics and convenient both for the reader and the author of a paper. We strongly recommend that you follow this model.
Sources used in your paper need to be presented in two places: (i) the short reference within the running text and (ii) the complete list of references at the end of the paper (see Section 2.6). If an idea or fact you present is not your own and cannot be assumed to be common knowledge, you are expected to cite it in the text.
You should focus on citing up-to-date literature including journal articles. Good starting points for your literature search are Google Scholar, the MLA International Bibliography and the Bibliography of Linguistic Literature, accessible via DBIS (Datenbank-Infosystem).
In general, do not overuse direct quotation since your own voice and line of argument can easily be lost in a "patchwork" of other authors' writing. Make paraphrases of the original content, your default instead. Sources for paraphrases also need to be given. Do not quote your lecture or seminar.

In-text citation
You can cite literature either by using quotations or by paraphrasing the content. In both cases, you must provide a reference. Shorter direct quotations within the text are marked by double quotation marks. The source of a quotation within the text is rendered as "AUTHOR (YEAR: PAGE)" if the author is actually a constituent of your sentence, but as "(Author Year: Page)" if it is not. Note that the reference is never placed after a punctuation mark.
Aijmer (2013: 4) suggests that pragmatic markers function as "overt indicators of (or windows on) ongoing metalinguistic activity in the speaker's mind." For this reason, pragmatic markers have been described as "overt indicators of (or windows on) ongoing metalinguistic activity in the speaker's mind" (Aijmer 2013: 4).
If you cite entire works (e.g. books, chapters in edited volumes or journal articles) in a general way, stating page numbers is not necessary.
If you provide several sources within a single pair of parentheses, separate them with semicolons or commas.
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the emergence of sociolinguistic studies on Scottish English that followed a traditional Labovian approach (e.g. Macaulay & Trevelyan 1977;Romaine 1978;Speitel & Johnston 1983). If the same source is quoted multiple times in a single paragraph, you may use the abbreviation "ibid." (short for Latin ibidem 'in this place'). If the subsequent citation refers to the same page(s) as the earlier one, no page numbers are necessary, else you need to state the page or page range.
According to Cleveland (1993: 2), two processes are involved in visualization: (i) Encoding quantitative and categorical information into a display and (ii) visually decoding the information. Successful visualization methods result in "efficient, accurate decoding", while unsuccessful visualization results in "inefficient, inaccurate decoding" (ibid.). If successful, visualization conveys more information than other approaches (ibid.: 5).

Comments and omissions
It is unacceptable to change the form or content of a quotation, e.g. giving a translation or adding italics not present in the original. You may, however, make minor typographical adaptations, e.g. adding or removing capitalization at the beginning of a quotation so that it fits into the embedding sentence. Such changes must be made transparent by putting them in square brackets. In the following case, the original text has Attention with a capital A, because it starts a sentence. The change makes the direct quote compatible with the surrounding syntax of your text without distorting or altering its meaning.
As Bell (1984: 150) explains, "[a]ttention is at most a mechanism of response intervening between a situation and a style." Omissions within quotation marks are marked by three dots in square brackets " […]". This also applies to corpus examples, which should basically be treated like direct quotations, except that you do not need to put them in quotation marks if they occur as numbered examples. In the next (corpus) example, the author's interest may be only on the complementation pattern of the verb start (i.e. start to protest vs. start protesting), and much of the original corpus example is thus redundant and therefore left out.
(5) Kumi's mother started to protest […]. [ICE_NZ:W2F-010] The next example once again has a lower-case letter substituted for a capital letter, and it additionally leaves out parts of the original sentence.
As Goldstein (2011: 1) explains, "[i]ndividual people differ […], and this differentiation is mirrored in all kinds of social activity [...]." Comments necessary to fully understand a direct quotation can be inserted in square brackets and need to be followed by your initials. A special kind of comment is "[sic]" (Latin for 'so', 'like this') to highlight a mistake in the original text, or a form so unusual that your readers might otherwise think that you quoted incorrectly.
Hay & Sudbury (2005: 803) add the following caveat: "All of these claims about possible linguistic conditioning [of linking and intrusive /r/; OS], however, are based on informal observation and/or introspection." However, Sloppy (2022: 17) concedes that "the opprosite [sic] may also sometimes be the case."

Long direct quotations
Longer direct quotations of three or more lines begin on a new line, are single-spaced and indented by 1.25 cm on the left, and should be given a little extra interlinear space above and below. In this case, no quotation marks are needed. The exact source can be stated either in the text preceding the long quotation, or at the end of the indented text. In the following example, this would be after the full stop, thus: "... syntactic, or semantic information. (McMahon 1994: 70)". Note that the text following a long quotation -like text following a table or figure -is indented only if you start a new paragraph.
McMahon (1994: 70) describes sound change proper as a relatively mechanistic process uninfluenced by other linguistic levels: One major difference between sound change and analogy is that the former tends to involve only phonetic factors -in fact, both the Neogrammarians and the Structuralists made this a primary condition on sound change, which could never be sensitive to morphological, syntactic, or semantic information.
She also explains that the irregularities generated by this kind of sound change are then partly reduced via analogical change (ibid.).
For long quotes, you may add an additional indent on the right, and you may also use a slightly reduced font size of (10 pt.). The use of long quotes is recommended only if the original wording of an idea is of particular relevance.

Quotations in other languages and indirect quotations
If you directly quote a source written in a language other than English, an English translation needs to be provided in single quotation marks. Make sure the quotation does not clash with the English syntax of the embedding text. For instance, a formulation like the following is rather awkward: Menzerath (1941: 96) argues that "Diphthonge können in der Silbenstruktur keine andere Rolle spielen als die sonstigen Lautfolgen" ('within the structure of a syllable, diphthongs cannot play a different role than other sound sequences').
Here and in other cases, it might be more elegant to simply paraphrase into English and then give the German original in parentheses, or in a directly attached footnote.
Reproducing a direct or indirect quote you find in the literature without having seen the original should be the exception -you should only quote what you have actually checked against the original publication. Sometimes this may be unavailable, for instance if it is too old or unpublished. In this case, your quotation might look like this: In his following statement, Jamieson is quite vocal about the status of Scots: "I do not hesitate to call that the Scottish Language, which has generally been considered in no other light than as merely on a level with the different provincial dialects of the English" (Jamieson 1808: iv; quoted according to Beal 1997: 339).
If you quote Jamieson (1808) from Beal (1997) in this manner, you do not see the context of the original statement, and you need to trust Beal to have quoted accurately (which she has), including the italics in the original. It is easy to see how this can lead to small mistakes, inaccuracies or misrepresentations.
When quoting from second-hand sources, you still have to include bibliographical information on both the original text (Jamieson 1808) and the text from which you are quoting (Beal 1997) in your list of references. The same is true if you merely name studies that are quoted in the literature, e.g.: Romaine (1978) mentions descriptions of early twentieth-century realisations of /r/ by Williams (1912) and Grant (1914).
In this case, you need to provide the reference for all three sources, even if you have not looked at Williams and Grant.

Introducing quotations
When you include a paraphrase, summary or direct quotation, you should introduce it with a signal phrase. This often employs the source text as the grammatical subject of the sentence, followed by a verb that is then appropriately complemented by what you wish to quote: As Romaine (1982: 4) observes, "… ." Krug (2000: 251) concludes that … .
You are quoting texts, rather than persons. This is also why you generally use the present tense for the introduction of quotations and when referring to results and ideas from a source. Phrases like "As the famous linguist Randolph Quirk and his colleagues wrote in their ground-breaking grammar …" are not appropriate, and you should also not quote what your lecturer said in class.

Citing corpora
When introducing the corpus or corpora you use, give their full titles, cite their sources/compilers and introduce the abbreviation(s) you will be using to refer to the corpora. It can be tricky to obtain precise bibliographical information for corpora, and there is no standard way of doing this -just be as explicit as you can. Apart from citing the corpus, it is crucial that you explain in your methodology section how you searched: Which online interface did you use, and when? If you searched text files, how did you obtain them?
The sources of individual corpus examples should be given in square brackets as described in Section 3.5 above. Typically you state the corpus abbreviation and the unique text identifier.

Bibliography
At the end of the paper (and before a potential appendix) a complete alphabetical list of the sources used for your work is placed, ordered according to the last name of the authors. It begins on a new page, is entitled "References" and does not carry a chapter number. All books and articles referred to in the text must be listed and, conversely, all those listed in the references must have been referred to in the text.
In some cases, it can make sense to subdivide your list of references into different parts. For example, if you use a large number of corpora, if you analyse the content of several different dictionaries, or if you use several audio databases, it might be tidier to present these under a separate sub-header ("Corpora", "Dictionaries" and "Audio sources", respectively).

Monographs, chapters in edited volumes and journal articles
In the titles of books and chapters/articles, follow the general capitalization rules you would use if writing a normal text (i.e. in English titles, only the first word as well as proper names are capitalized; in German titles, nouns are generally capitalized). Starting from the second line, each entry in your list of references should be indented by 1.25 cm. If there are several references that agree in author and year, the letters "a", "b" etc. are added after the year, both in the references in the text and in the list of references. First names of authors are spelled out, middle names may be abbreviated.
Monographs state the name(s) of the author(s), the year of publication, the title and subtitle (in italics), the number of the edition (if there is more than one), the number of volumes (if more than one) or the number of the volume that was used (in which case the subtitle of the volume may follow this information), the series and series volume number (if applicable), the place of publication and the publisher. An entry begins with the first author's surname; from the second author onwards, the surname follows the first name, without a comma.
Jones, Charles (ed. There will sometimes be a manual or guide accompanying the corpus, often provided online, which can then also be cited. Some corpora provide information in a "how to cite" section in the documentation.

Dictionaries
Most dictionaries are available either as an online resource or as a hard copy and should be cited accordingly. Unless you have good reasons to do otherwise, it is preferable to include only the citation for the entire dictionary in your list of references and to refer to the individual entries in the running text; e.g. "(cf. OED, s.v. despite, prep.)", which means the entry for despite ("s.v.": Latin sub verbo 'under the word') as a preposition.

Online sources
You should primarily cite trustworthy, printed sources or equivalent electronic books or online journals. If you use online sources, make sure that the information presented there is reliable. Find the author, title and date of the source and make the entry in the list of references as precise and complete as possible. The date given in the reference is the date on which you last accessed the site.

Software
It becomes increasingly common to also cite software that has been used. In linguistics, this mostly refers to either concordance programs such as AntConc or scripting languages such as R. Make sure to cite the version of the program that you have actually used.