Using examples
How to use examples in text: expressions, glosses, and other examples
Linguistic Expressions: Use and Mention
In a linguistics essay, it is particularly important to make a distinction between the expressions you are using in writing your essay and the words or expressions you are writing about (i.e. those you are citing, or mentioning).
When you are mentioning an expression, the expression cited must be typographically distinctive: it should be formatted differently so it stands out. The usual way to do this is by putting it in italics. Thus, when mentioning the prepositional phrase (PP) round the bend, italicise it as exemplified here. Bath is a four-letter word, but Bath is a city in the southwest of England.
If an example is particularly important, if it is a full sentence, or if you are going to refer to it again or compare it with other examples, you should give it a bracketed number and format it apart from your prose: add an empty line above and below, and indent it. For example, an alternative way of citing the sentence These fritters need to be thrown away is as shown in (1):
(1) These fritters need to be thrown away.
Make sure that an example is not spread across pages. If you use Microsoft Word, read this information on how to keep lines together on a page.
You can see another example with appropriate prose below.
Where an example is numbered and formatted away from the prose, it need not be italicised. Thereafter it need only be referred to by its number, for example, "As illustrated in (2), ...". If you use more than one example, they must be consecutively numbered throughout.
Glosses from other languages
Whenever you discuss words or sentences from another language, you will need to make clear their meaning to the reader. If it is just a single word or short phrase, you can make it part of your ordinary text, as shown in (3) below. Italicise it and, immediately following it, supply a translation into English (not in italics, but in quotation marks). An example would be:
(3) In addition to the verb essen 'to eat', German also has a verb fressen 'to devour/to eat like an animal'.
If you want to give an entire sentence, this should be done as a numbered example. like the following in (4) for a Bengali sentence:
The first line gives the Bengali sentence, the second line gives the so-called gloss (i.e. a translation for each separate Bengali word), and the third line gives a translation of the entire sentence. No italics are used, but the third line is in quotation marks. Also note that each source word must be left-aligned with the corresponding gloss, as shown in examples (4)-(6).
This method should also be used if the sentence is not from another language but from an earlier stage of English, and would not be immediately comprehensible to a non-specialist. An example with an Old English sentence is given in (5):
The information in the fourth line of (5) is to identify the text and page that the Old English sentence has been taken from. In this case, the sentence has been taken from an electronic corpus, and the system of referencing of that corpus is used.
How you reference a particular corpus will depend on the format of the corpus, and conventions for that particular corpus. Corpora will generally have specific recommendations for how to cite them; look out for these.
In cases where a text is published as a hard copy, a reference might consist of the name of the editor, the year of publication of the edition and the page where the sentence is found, as shown in (6):
Like other inline examples, glosses and translations must be text-blocked.
If you use Microsoft Word, read this information on how to keep lines together on a page.
If you need to know about more complicated cases, check and follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules.
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