Guidelines for Submission
of contributions to JCPL

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (JPCL)
JPCL Web site

Authors: Please consult the attached information sheets before and while writing your review or article for JPCL!

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (JPCL)

The mission of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages is to provide a forum for the scholarly study of pidgins, creoles, and other contact varieties, from multi-disciplinary perspectives. We place special emphasis on current research devoted to empirical description, theoretical issues, and the broader implications of the study of pidgins and creoles for theories of acquisition and change, and for linguistic theory in general. We also encourage contributions that explore the application of linguistic research to language planning, education, and social reform, as well as studies that examine the role of pidgin and creoles in the social life and culture, including the literature, of creole-speaking communities.

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1. Submissions

   
   
   1. Contributions are welcome from all countries and should be written in English. Authors may submit contributions as electronic files via attachment to jpcl@ling.osu.edu, but must also send one hard copy to the Editor (address above).
   
   
   2. Book reviews must be submitted to the Associate Editor Armin Schwegler (address above). They are by invitation only. All other contributions must be submitted to the Editor. Please note that hard copies and CDs cannot be returned.
   
   
   3. Manuscripts of articles must be accompanied by both a set of keywords (maximum 10) and an abstract of 100-200 words. The abstract should be a summary of the entire paper, not just the conclusions. The only constraint on the length of articles is that they should be no longer than they need be. Authors must write concisely, avoiding excessive numbers of examples.
   
   
   4. Short notes are restricted to a maximum length of 1500 words and need not be accompanied by keywords or abstracts.

2. Style

   
   
   All manuscripts should carefully follow the style sheet guidelines below. Manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines will have to be revised by the authors, especially with regard to references and notes.
   
   
   1. When submitting the first draft of your paper to JPCL, please use the insert footnote function of your word processor. The footnotes should appear in the text of the paper. Please also include all tables, figures, graphics, trees, etc. in the body of the paper.
   
   
   2. When submitting the final draft of your paper, please do NOT embed footnotes (i.e. do not use your word processor's Insert Footnote function). Instead, manually type these at the end of the manuscript after the references. In the manuscript, indicate where the footnote should be embedded (e.g. (footnote 1 here)).
   
   
   3. Software: We prefer that you submit files in MsWord (PC or Mac) OR RTF format, as well as pdf format. If other word processing software is used, let this software create a Word or RTF conversion and submit this together with the original source files.
   
   
   4. Fonts: The text should be typed in 12-point font using Times or Times New Roman fonts, preferably in MS Word or Rich Text Format (RTF). If you need to use phonetic fonts, we prefer the use of the unicode Doulos SIL phonetic fonts, which you can download from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). If you use any other font, please send these to us to ensure readability of your manuscript.
   
   
   5. Transcriptions should, wherever possible, employ the symbols and conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The transcription should be no narrower than is necessary, as some symbols and/or diacritics may not be easily transmitted electronically.
   
   
   6. Please also send a pdf version and a hard copy of your paper if you use special symbols or illustrations etc., in other formats. The hard copy and/or PDF should show all special characters as they should appear in print. When generating a PDF, make sure all fonts are embedded.
   
   
   7. Place all tables, figures, graphics, trees, etc. at the end of the paper in the final draft. Centered below each figure, put its number, followed by a brief legend on a separate line. In the body of the manuscript, indicate the proper place for each figure, table etc. with a notation of the following sort on its own line:
      INSERT FIGURE X ABOUT HERE
      In the main text, reference should be made to the table or figure in such a manner that its location is not absolutely fixed, e.g. "as in Table 1.", not "as in this table."
   
   
   8. Spacing: Please use 1.5 spacing for everything in the manuscript (including the titles and headings, notes, indented quotations, and references).
   
   
   9. Margins of approximately 1-1/2 inches (3.8 cm) should be left on all four sides of each sheet.
   
   
   10. Headers/footers: Only page numbers should appear as headers or footers.
   
   
   11. Drawings, trees, and other illustrations, including photographs, or "plates" (though not simple rules, examples, or formulae), must be reproducible originals. Both an electronic copy and hard copy must be sent. Any labels and details should be clear and large enough to remain legible after a reduction to half size. Graphics and pictures may be submitted electronically in the following formats: JPEG, TIFF, and EPS. Note that printing is in black and white (though the electronic edition may show color), so please ensure that graphics are relevant without color. Resolution should be at least 600 dpi. The dimension of the picture or graphic should not exceed the printed area of the page (i.e. should not spill into the margins); otherwise, it may have to be reduced, resulting in a loss of detail.

3. Punctuation

   
   
   1. Use single quotation marks in all cases except quotes within quotes. Periods, commas, colons, and semicolons appear after the second member of a pair of quotation marks. For example: She said 'Mexican food is my favorite'.
   
   
   2. When quotations exceed 40 words, they should be indented. No quotation marks are necessary in this case.
   
   
   3. Do not hyphenate words containing prefixes except to prevent misreadings. However, use a hyphen whenever the stem begins with a capital letter (e.g. non-Dravidian).
   
   
   4. Ellipses should consist of three close-set periods with a blank space before and after.
   
   
   5. Place a comma before the last member of a series of three or more elements. Do not use a comma after the expressions e.g. and i.e.

4. Example Sentences

   
   
   1. Examples not in English must be translated. When necessary, include both a word-for-word or morpheme-by-morpheme gloss in addition to a free translation.
   
   
   2. When an example is glossed, words in the example should be separated by tabs, with each gloss appearing on the next line, aligned to the beginning of the word it corresponds to.
   
   
   3. Gloss lexical roots in lowercase roman type. Gloss persons as 1, 2, 3, 4. Gloss all other grammatical categories in small capitals.
   
   
   4. Place a hyphen between morphs in the original, and a corresponding hyphen in the gloss.
   
   
   5. If a single morph in the original corresponds to two or more elements in the gloss, separate the latter elements with a period.
   
   
   6. If you abbreviate the names of grammatical categories in the gloss, provide the full forms in a footnote.
   
   
   7. The free translation occupies a third line below the gloss line.
      
      Examples:
      
      A
      saka
      komoto
      ne
      en
      sodo
      .
      
      3sg
      descend
      come.out
      LOC
      3sg.POSS
      house.on.stilts
      
      
      'She came down from her house on stilts.'
      
      
      Den
      án
      be
      mu
      go
      ape
      
      
      3pl
      NEG
      PAST
      must
      go
      there
      
      
      'They should not have gone there.'

5. Citing Words, Etc. in the Text

   
   
   1. Words cited within the text should be italicized.
   
   
   2. Use angled brackets to refer to graphemes: For example: the letter <h>.
   
   
   3. Transliterate or transcribe all forms from languages not normally written with the Latin alphabet, including Greek, unless using the original orthography contributes to your argument.
   
   
   4. After the first occurrence of a non-English word or phrase, italicize it and provide a gloss in single quotation marks. No comma is necessary before or after the gloss.
      Example: The modal musu 'must'.

6. Numbering Examples and Rules

   
   
   1. Each numbered item should occupy a separate indented line with the number in parentheses. Use lowercase letters to refer to group sets of related examples:
      
      a. Salsa is quite desirable.
      b. Guacamole is even better.
   
   
   2. Within the text, refer to numbered items as (1), (1a), (1a,b), (1a-c).
   
   
   3. Highlight key segments in the examples in bold.

7. Abbreviations

   
   
   1. Abbreviations ending in lower-case letters are followed by a period (e.g. ling.), but those ending in a capital letter are not (e.g. US).
   
   
   2. Names of languages in pre-nominal position may be abbreviated (e.g. Fr. nouns).
   
   
   3. Use prime notation (S', N'') rather than bar notation.

8. Citations in the Text

   
   
   1. In-text citations should have the following form: (Rickford 1986:215-216).
   
   
   2. When the author's name is part of the text, use the following form: Rickford (1986:36) observes…
   
   
   3. Do not use notes for citations only.
   
   
   4. Book titles cited within the text (but not in the references) are capitalized and italicized. Article titles are italicized and appear within single quotes.

9. Titles and Headings

   
   
   1. Use the same roman typesize as the body of the text for all titles and headings.
   
   
   2. Capitalize only the first word and such words as the orthography of the language requires.
   
   
   3. Place section headings on a line with the section number and the first line of the section:
      
      
      1. Introduction. The socio-historical background...
   
   
   4. Please mark the hierarchy of sub-headings as follows:
      Heading A: Bold: Two line spaces above and one line space below.
      Heading B: Italics: One line space above and one line space below.
      Heading C: Italics. One line space above. Text on new line.

10. References

    
    At the end of the manuscript, provide a full, double-spaced bibliography preceded by the heading 'References' (not bold), using the following guidelines.
    
    
    1. The references section should include all and only the sources mentioned in the article.
    
    
    2. Arrange the entries alphabetically by the authors' last names, with each entry as a separate hanging indented paragraph.
    
    
    3. All author/editor first names should be spelled out. Not doing so only serves to make the citation less informative. Do not replace given names (first names) with initials unless the author normally uses initials. Use a middle name or initial only in the author normally does so.
    
    
    4. Names with "von", "van", "de", etc. (e.g. Elly van Gelderen) should be referred to with the "van" (or the "de" or other patronymic) as part of the last name: van Gelderen, Elly.
    
    
    5. Names with "Jr.", "IV.", etc. Following library practice, list elements such as "Jr." as a subelement after names, separated by a comma.
       Smith, Sean, Jr.
    
    
    6. The ampersand is useful. Use ampersand to distinguish higher and lower order conjuncts, i.e. [W & X] and [Y & Z], as in Culicover & Wilkins and Koster & May. It is relatively easy to see that reference is made here to two pairs of authors here (Culicover and Wilkins and Koster and May).
    
    
    7. List multiple works by the same author from earliest to latest.
    
    
    8. Use lower-case letters to distinguish items published by a single author in a single year, e.g. Dawson, Ann 2003a, 2003b, etc.
    
    
    9. If more than one article from a single book is cited, list the book as a separate entry under the editor's name, with cross-references to the book in the entries for each article.
    
    
    10. Use capitalization of all lexical words for journal titles. Capitalize only the first word (plus proper names and the first word after a colon) for book/dissertation titles and article/chapter titles. This is a useful diagnostic for discriminating between titles that are recurring and those that are not. The journal style for capitalization should also be applied to the title of book series. Thus, the citation of a SNLLT volume would be punctuated: Objects and other subjects: Grammatical functions, functional categories and configurationality (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 52).
    
    
    11. Placing parentheses around ed. makes sense. Commas and periods should be used exclusively to separate citation components (e.g., "Author. Year."), or subcomponents (e.g. "author1, author2 & author3). Since "ed." is neither a component nor a subcomponent, but a modifier of a component, it should not be separated from the name by a comma:
        
        surname, firstname = author
        surname, firstname (ed.). = editor (NOT surname, firstname, ed.)
        surname, firstname & firstname surname (eds.) = editors
    
    
    12. Use "In" to designate chapters in collections. This makes the book's format maximally similar to the standard citation format. This, in turn, would be time-saving when the author or the editor notice that more than one article is cited from a given collection and hence that that book's details should be set out as a separate entry in the references (and the full details deleted from the articles' entries).
        
        author. year. chaptertitle. In editorname (ed.), collectiontitle, pagenumbers. publisher.
    
    
    13. Journal volume numbers. We favor: volumenumber(volumeissue). startingpage- endingpage. Thus: 22(1). 135-169. Note the space between volume number/issue and page numbers. Special formatting (e.g., bold for volume number) is superfluous. Issue numbers are a parenthetical modifier (cf. "ed." above) of the volume number. While it is not necessary information for identifying the article, it is extremely useful information.
    
    
    14. Dissertations/theses. These conform to the already-widespread Place: Publisher format and fit readily into the rest of the standard: Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. Instead of archaic state abbreviations, use the official two-letter postal abbreviations. Note that national and other traditions vary in exactly what is labeled 'thesis' versus 'dissertation' and in distinguishing 'PhD' from 'doctoral' dissertations.
        
        Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.
        Chapel Hill: UNC MA thesis.
    
    
    15. On-line materials. The basic information here – author, date, title – remains the same, and the URL where the resource was found takes the place of publisher or journal. We urge authors to include the date the material was accessed, in parentheses after the URL, since new versions often replace old ones. For a .pdf file, this would be the date of downloading, but for a resource like an on-line dictionary consulted repeatedly, a range of dates may be needed. For additional discussion of handling on- line citations, authors may want to consult this guide:
        
        Walker, Janice R. & Todd Taylor. 1998. The Columbia Guide to Online Style. New York: Columbia University Press.
    
    
    16. Publications yet to appear.
        Please indicate forthcoming publications by using 'to appear' in parentheses instead of a date. Thus: "...according to Plag (to appear)."
    
    Examples:
    Book (monograph):
    Blackmore, Susan J. 1982. Beyond the body. London: Heinemann.
    
    Book in Series:
    Migge, Bettina. 2003. Creole formation as language contact: The case of the Surinamese
    creoles. Creole Language Library 25. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
    
    Book (edited volume):
    Clahsen, Harald (ed.). 1991. Generative perspectives on language acquisition [Language
    Acquisition & Language Disorders 14]. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
    Simmons-McDonald, Hazel & Ian Robertson (eds.). 2006. Exploring the boundaries of
    Caribbean creole languages. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.
    
    Article (in book):
    Adams, Clare A. & Dickinson, Anthony. 1981. Actions and habits: Variation in
    associative representation during instrumental learning. In Norman E. Spear & Ralph R. Miller (eds.), Information processing in animals: Memory mechanisms, 143-186. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
    
    Articles (in journal):
    Rayson, Paul, Leech, Geoffrey N. & Hodges, Mary. 1997. Social differentiation in the
    use of English vocabulary: Some analyses of the conversational component of the British National Corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 2. 120-132.
    Thomas, Alan R. 1987. A spoken standard for Welsh: Description and pedagogy.
    International Journal of the Sociology of Language 66 (4). 99-113.
    
    Article (on webpage)
    Franks, Steven. 2005. Bulgarian clitics are positioned in the syntax.
    Bulgarian Clitics are Positioned in the Syntax [PDF] (17 May, 2006.)
    
    Dissertation/thesis
    Stewart, Thomas W., Jr. 2000. Mutation as morphology: Bases, stems, and shapes in Scottish Gaelic. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University dissertation.
    
    Unpublished ms.
    Miner, Kenneth. 1990. Winnebago accent: The rest of the data. Lawrence: University of Kansas, ms.

11. Corrections

    
    Authors are asked to check their manuscripts very carefully before submitting them in order to avoid delays at the corrections stage. In addition, authors are asked to provide the Editor with both email and surface mail address where proofs can be mailed. Authors will be expected to correct proofs and return them to the Editor, by airmail where appropriate, within seven days of receipt. Since corrections in the proof stage are very costly, changes by authors involving alteration of the original text may be charged. Authors should understand that reference updates, though clearly desirable, are difficult to implement at this stage and generally cannot be made.

12. Permissions

    
    It is the responsibility of the authors to obtain permissions to reprint materials that have been previously published. Permissions are mandatory for prose texts that exceed more than 400 words, all poetry, and figures and tables.

13. Copyrights

    
    Upon acceptance of a contribution, author(s) will be asked to transfer the copyright of the article or review to the publisher. The transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information.

14. Editing

    
    The Editors reserve the right to introduce minor cuts and to amend the phrasing and punctuation in all items accepted for publication.

15. Guidelines for Book Reviews

    
    The style and formatting guidelines described for manuscripts apply to book reviews as well. We will normally invite reviews, but unsolicited reviews may be accepted. Reviews should be written in English, and should normally be no more than 1500 words. Unusually long, in-depth reviews are classified as review articles. The editors reserve the right to ask for revisions of reviews, or in rare cases, to decline to print a review altogether. Submit a copy as an electronic mail attachment (Microsoft Word format) to the Associate Editor, Armin Schwegler, at aschwegl@uci.edu. The receipt of your review will be promptly acknowledged.

16. Review Heading Format

    
    Reviewers' identification should be placed after the heading of the review, giving the first and last name of the reviewer and affiliation. For example:
    
    
    Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Edited by Nancy C. Dorian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989. Pp. 445. Cloth $59.50. [To order electronically, visit www.vwb-verlag.com]
    Reviewed by Patricia Nichols, San Jose State University
    
    The text of the review follows. A full bibliography, prepared according to the guidelines for manuscripts laid out above, should be included.