Common Problems in Preparing Manuscripts for CL

Here are some common problems that we see in material provided to CL in LaTeX form. You can speed up processing of your manuscript, and avoid copy-editing changes that might be inconsistent with your intended meaning, by using the following as a check-list before you send in the final version of your paper. Some of these are universal rules; some are just the way we do things at CL. If you want to take issue with any of these rules, the editor would be pleased to receive your email.

• Angle Brackets: Angle brackets -- as you might use, for example, to delimit a vector or an attribute-value pair -- in LaTeX are not the same as the inequality symbols: the angle bracket characters are '〈' and '〉', not '<' and '>'. You get the angle brackets using the following commands in math mode: \langle and \rangle.

• Citations: Make sure you distinguish appropriately between syntactic citations (where the citation plays a syntactic role in its host sentence) and parenthetical citations (where the citation can be excised from the sentence without damaging its grammaticality). So, for example, the following is not correct:

  (Foo and Bar 2006) presents an extension ...

  and should instead be as follows:

  Foo and Bar (2006) present an extension ...

  Note here also that the number of the verb is in agreement with the number of authors, since it's the authors who do the presenting that's being talked about. Use the \shortcite command to get the correct citation behaviour; you'll need to put the authors names in the running text yourself in these cases. You might also want to check out the further discussion of citations here.

• En-dashes: Use an en-dash (achieved in LaTeX by two dashes in sequence, i.e. `--') rather than a hyphen when the words so combined are of equal status, as opposed to one modifying the other. Here are some very common compounds that require an en-dash:
  • predicate--argument structure
  • attribute--value pair
  • syntax--semantics interface

  Note that you should also use en-dashes in number ranges and page ranges, as in 56--69.

• Em-dashes: Sometimes you want to separate off a piece of text --- like this --- with dashes. Those dashes should be em-dashes, and you achieve them in LaTeX by using a sequence of three dashses. Note that there are spaces either side of the em-dash.

• Paragraph Indents: Watch out for indents on paragraphs after equations, bulleted lists and other similar environments: LaTeX tends to put an indent if you have a blank line between the environment and the following text, and omits the indent if there is no blank line. If you want to be sure to suppress the indent, you can put a \noindent command immediately before the following text. Generally you should only have an indent where there is a change of topic, and no indent where discussion of the topic preceding the environment is continued.

• Reference Lists: Make sure you switch into twocolumn mode for the reference list: put a \starttwocolumn command immediately before the bibliography.

• Text in Math Mode: Don't put plain text (e.g. predicate names in a logical formula) in math mode: LaTeX tries to be smart about what characters might correspond to function names, and you get weird spacing as a result. So, the following is bad:

  $... Foo(bar) ...$

  LaTeX will insert thin spaces in places where you didn't intend them to be. You need to protect the text to prevent this behaviour:

  $... \mbox{Foo}(\mbox{bar}) ...$

  If you really want to have the text in italics, then do this:

  $... \mbox{\it Foo}(\mbox{\it bar}) ...$

Anything Above Not Clear?

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Last Modified: 14th March 2011