Tables and figures
Last updated
Last updated
In many fields of linguistics (e.g. sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, experimental linguistics), results are often presented in tables and figures. They are numbered consecutively and given a caption under the table/figure. Your caption should be descriptive, and is generally presented in a smaller font size than the main text and centred. Figures should have readable text and clearly labelled x and y axes.
Use numbering to refer to tables and figures in the body of your essay (e.g. ‘As shown in Figure 1 below, ...’; ‘Table 1 summarises the results of the survey.’). The first reference to a figure or table should occur near where the table or figure is placed in text.
If you’ve reproduced the table from an existing study, you need to mention the source, as shown in the example below.