Author Guidelines

Aims and focus of the journal

Semantics of Natural Languages (SNL) is a linguistics journal dedicated to the study of meaning in natural languages, with a particular focus on the relation between meaning and linguistic structure. While SNL is firmly grounded in semantics, it welcomes contributions that draw on insights from related fields such as logic, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and cognition, typology and the core domains of linguistics — provided the work is specifically directed toward linguists and advances our understanding of semantics.

A central aim of the journal is to elucidate how meaning interacts with linguistic structure, while at the same time broadening the empirical foundation of semantics research beyond English. Articles typically take a particular linguistic phenomenon as their point of departure and approach it with formal rigor, often making use of concepts from logic, philosophy of language, or mathematics.

Submission information

Submissions are made through the journal website.

We have a hard length limit of 18,000 words, including footnotes, references, and appendices.. Please indicate the word count directly under the paper title on the submitted manuscript.

The paper should be submitted as a single PDF file, including all figures, images, etc. (Separate image files may be requested as part of the production process if the paper is accepted for publication.)

All files must be anonymous at the point of submission. Author details are added to the manuscript PDF only after the paper is accepted for publication.

Formatting according to the stylesheet is required for the accepted version only. LaTeX resources are currently under development and will be released later in 2026. When LaTeX resources are available, authors will be encouraged to use them.

Guidance for experimental papers

In view of the increasing importance of experimental data for theoretical work in the field, we endorse the following guidelines to promote good scientific practices, help streamline the review process, and make experimental work widely accessible. They are guidelines outlining default standards and expectations, thus not strictly obligatory, though deviation from any major component should be well-motivated and justified.

Authors are generally expected to make data and analysis code available, whenever feasible; experiment implementation files and resources should also be shared as much as possible in formats that make it as easy as possible to replicate the experiment. Authors are urged to consider pre-registration of their work, although deviation from pre-registered analysis plans is acceptable when explicitly motivated and justified. Exploratory analyses conducted post-hoc are also permissible, but should be transparently flagged as such. Reasoning about decisions behind sample sizes should be explicitly discussed. Reports of experimental work should include standard ingredients and follow the format common in experimental journals (e.g., in psycholinguistics or psychology) as much as possible. This includes explicit introduction of hypotheses and predictions, methods (e.g., participants, procedures, design, and stimuli), and results (including data treatment and statistical analysis). While these components should be presented to make the experimental part maximally accessible to an interdisciplinary experimentalist readership, the overall structure of a paper including experimental work is more flexible, as theoretical background and motivations, as well as discussion of implications of empirical findings, may call for sections that more closely follow the style and format of theoretical papers in semantics.

Style sheet

Much of this style guide for SNL is adapted from the Glossa style sheet (Paul & Vanden Wyngaerd 2021) and from the Generic Style Rules for Linguistics (Haspelmath 2014).

Structure

Title page

SNL uses double-blind review; author names should not be revealed to reviewers. As part of the submission process, the names, affiliations, and contact details for all authors will be entered into the online system. The manuscript itself must omit this information until after acceptance for publication.

In the title of the paper, capitalize only the first word and words that need capitals in any context. When a paper is accepted, in the final version, the title is followed on the title page by the first and last name of the author(s), their affiliation, and e-mail. When there are multiple authors, each author name is followed immediately by the author’s affiliation and email. First names should not include only initials unless this represents the way an individual author prefers to be referred to. (For instance: an author who wishes to be referred to by their first initial “R.” may list their name as “R. Smith”. An author who does not wish to be referred to in this way should spell their first name out.)

Abstract and keywords

An abstract must precede the paper. This abstract should be 100-300 words in length. Abstracts typically summarize the main arguments and conclusions of the paper. Authors should be aware that the abstract is automatically attached to the email message inviting reviewers to review the paper.

A list of up to six key words should be placed below the abstract.

Main text

Articles are subdivided into numbered sections (and possibly subsections), each of which has a heading. The numbering always begins with 1 (Section 1: 1.1, 1.2, Section 2: 2.1, 2.2, etc.), so that 0 never occurs in section numbering.

The last numbered section may be followed by one or more of the following unnumbered sections, in this order:

  • Appendices, numbered A, B, C, etc.

  • Data and supplemental files

  • Authors’ contributions (see below)

After this is the references section, which is the final section of the paper.

If a (sub-)section has (sub-)subsections, there must be minimally two of them.

Section headings do not end with a period.

Appendices (optional)

Appendices are typeset with the main article and count toward the overall word limit. Appendices are appropriate for proofs, discussion of side topics, etc.

Data and supplemental files (optional)

As noted above in connection with experimental work, SNL strongly encourages authors to make available to readers all data, scripts, and/or software code on which the paper’s conclusions rest, whenever it is ethically feasible to do so. Data may be provided in the main manuscript itself or in an appendix, though we note that both are subject to the overall word limit of 18,000 words. When materials of this type cannot be accommodated within the paper, we suggest that data be deposited in a public repository whenever possible. A brief description of this material and information about how to access it (e.g. a DOI) should be provided in this section when applicable.

Please ensure that the link to the repository, as well as the materials themselves, are anonymized for the purposes of review. Instructions for doing this on the Open Science Framework repository are here.

Authors' contributions (optional)

Coauthored papers may contain a short section immediately prior to the references section explaining the contribution of each author to the overall work. For guidance concerning who can be counted as an author, we recommend the ICMJE guidelines.

References

The list of references appears after the last appendix, in an un-numbered section titled References. All references cited within the submission must be listed at the end of the main text file, and all works in the references section must be cited in the text. The formatting of references and in-text citations is discussed elsewhere in this style sheet.

Examples, formulas, figures, and tables

Numbered examples

Examples from languages other than English should be glossed in a standard three-line glossing format, including a translation. We recommend the use of the Leipzig Glossing Rules. A full list of all abbreviations used in glossing must be provided in a footnote immediately prior to the first example making use of the relevant abbreviations. In a paper presenting data from multiple languages, multiple abbreviation footnotes may be used, each presenting the abbreviations used for a particular language and each appearing in the text immediately prior to the first example making use of the relevant abbreviations.

Example numbers are left-aligned and enclosed in parentheses. Examples are numbered consecutively.

The capitalization and punctuation of example sentences should follow the typical conventions for the relevant language; for many languages, this will mean an initial capital and a final period for examples that are complete sentences, and no capitalization and no period for other examples.

The gloss line has no capitalization and no punctuation.

In cases where the language name is needed in the example block itself, this information should be added on an extra line above the three-line glossed example. Sources of numbered examples are standardly given directly after the idiomatic translation, though when the language name is added on a separate line, the citation may appear immediately after the language name.

In footnotes, examples are numbered with lower case Roman numerals between parentheses. Numbering restarts for each new footnote.

Ungrammatical examples can be given a translation preceded by 'intended:'.

For languages with non-Roman writing systems, a standard form of romanization should be used either in lieu of or in addition to the original writing system. If both romanization and a non-Roman script are used, please use a four-line gloss, where romanized text is aligned with glossing material.

In cases where an example needs additional explanation, authors are asked to provide this explanation as much as possible in the text around the example, rather than the example itself.

Formulas

Formulas must be carefully proofread by the author. Any novel notational conventions, as well as any conventions unlikely to be familiar to an average SNL reader, should be clearly explained in the text.

Formulas should generally be offset from the text and numbered, using the same numbering used for examples.

Tables and figures

Tables and figures are numbered consecutively, using a separate numbering system in each case. The first table is Table 1, the first figure is Figure 1, etc. Each table and each figure should have a caption. The caption is placed below figures and tables. If the caption is not a complete sentence, it is not followed by a period.

Authors are asked not to refer to tables and figures using the words “following”, “below” or “above”, as the final placement of the table or figure in the typeset paper may be different from the original placement in the manuscript. Instead, please refer to them by number, e.g. "as shown in Table 2", "as illustrated in Figure 1".

(Foot)notes

Notes must be footnotes rather than endnotes and should be used sparingly. Do not use footnotes for the purposes of referencing; use in-text citations for this.

The acknowledgements of the paper should be stated in a footnote with the special mark '*'.

Footnote numbers thereafter start with 1. The footnote reference number normally follows a period or a comma, though exceptionally it may follow an individual word.

Examples in footnotes have the numbers (i), (ii), etc.

In-text citations

We follow Semantics & Pragmatics and Linguistic Inquiry in the use of parentheses in in-text citations. If the text reference refers to the author, the date of the work is enclosed in parentheses. See the example below.

Heim and Kratzer (1998) introduce the composition rule Predicate Modification.

If the author-plus-date construction refers to the work itself, rather than the author, the date is not enclosed in parentheses.

Heim and Kratzer 1998 introduces the composition rule Predicate Modification.

When an entire citation is enclosed in parentheses, for purposes of backgrounding, no additional parentheses enclose the date.

Composition proceeds via Predicate Modification (Heim and Kratzer 1998).

When citing a work by three or more or more authors, we suggest that the first author’s name plus 'et al.' be used each time the work is mentioned.

Lists of citations inside a single parenthesis are ordered chronologically, not alphabetically, and are separated by commas rather than semicolons. When multiple works by the same author are cited, the author name need not be repeated, and the years are separated by commas.

A comma should never appear between the author and the date in an in-text citation.

Where page numbers are given in an in-text citation, the page numbers follow the year after a colon and a space, and they are given with complete numbers (no digits dropped).

Surnames with internal complexity have upper or lower case according to how the author spells their own name.

Reference section

For the formatting of the references section we follow Glossa style. Authors using LaTeX should use the glossa.bst file available here. Those using Zotero should use the Glossa CSL file available here.

Typographical conventions

Use of italics

Italics are used in the following cases:

  • for all object-language forms (words, phrases, sentences) that are cited within the text, unless they are phonetic transcriptions

  • for words and expressions from classical languages (de se, ad hoc, etc.)

  • When a technical term is referred to metalinguistically, e.g.

    I refer to this as the opaque reading.

  • For emphasis of a particular word that is not a technical term, e.g.

    This is true here, but not only here.

  • For emphasis within a quotation. Emphasis added by the author should be marked with the indication [emphasis mine] or [emphasis ours] at the end of the quotation; emphasis original to the quoted text may be marked with [emphasis original] at the end of the quotation

Italics are not used to highlight particular parts of glossed examples. Please use boldface for this.

Use of boldface and other highlighting

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.

Full caps and underlining are not normally used for highlighting.

Use of quotation marks

Double quotation marks are used

  • for verbatim reproduction, i.e. when a passage from another work is quoted in the text.

  • for distancing, i.e. when a technical term or other expression is mentioned that the author does not wish to adopt.

Single quotation marks are used exclusively for English translations of object-language forms, e.g.

Latin *habere* ‘have’ is not cognate with Old English *hafian* ‘have’.

Quotes within quotes are not treated in a special way.

Quotations originally in other languages should be translated into English. Where appropriate, the original may be provided in a footnote.

Usage

For single-authored papers, we encourage authors to refer to themselves in the singular (I) and to use we only to refer to themselves and the reader jointly.

We take no editorial stand on the following matters:

  • the use of the Oxford comma

  • the use of British vs. American spelling conventions, or of additional/hybrid systems such as those used in Canada and Australia

  • the use of Latin abbreviations (e.g., et seq., i.a., etc.)

  • the use of which vs. that in restrictive relative clauses

  • the use of n-dash vs. m-dash

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