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Aims and scope

Phonology is concerned with all aspects of phonology and related disciplines. The journal is published quarterly, and carries Research Articles, as well as Book Reviews and shorter pieces on topics of current interest within phonology.

Preference is given to papers which make a substantial theoretical contribution, irrespective of the particular theoretical framework employed, but the submission of papers presenting novel empirical data that expand our understanding of phonological phenomena is also encouraged.

From time to time, one of the issues is devoted to a particular theme. The editors encourage the submission of papers on proposed themes as well as on other topics relevant to the interests of Phonology. In addition, they welcome suggestions for future themes, as well as offers to act as guest editor for particular themes. The language of publication is English.

Manuscript types

Regular research articles

Preference is given to papers which make a substantial theoretical contribution, irrespective of the particular theoretical framework employed. Submission of papers presenting novel empirical data that expand our understanding of phonological phenomena is also encouraged.

Squibs

Squibs are shorter pieces that draw attention to a new data set or explore a theoretical or methodological point. Squibs are not required to propose a solution to problems they address as long as their relevance to theoretical issues is made clear.

A squib should address one or more of the following points:

empirical phenomena that challenge accepted generalisations;
empirical phenomena that are problematic for some aspect of a theory or method;
empirical phenomena that confirm predictions of a theory in an area where the theory has not previously been tested;
empirical phenomena that fall outside the scope of any existing theory or method;
inconsistencies in a theory or method;
inconsistencies in a set of frequently adopted theoretical or methodological assumptions;
unnoticed assumptions underlying a theory or method;
supplementary assumptions that a theory needs in order to make desired predictions;
little-known or forgotten literature that discusses issues of immediate theoretical or methodological relevance.

Book reviews

If you are interested in reviewing a book for Phonology, please contact the Book Review Editor, Gillian Gallagher (ggillian@nyu.edu). Unsolicited book review submissions will not be considered

Manuscript requirements

For all submissions, authors should include:

an abstract of the paper (no longer than 150 words):
Abstracts should be able to stand on their own, and so should normally avoid including bibliographic citations
a list of 5-10 keywords
a word count.

The submission form provides separate fields for these, so they need not be included in the main PDF file itself.
Initial submissions need not follow exactly the style guidelines for manuscripts that have been accepted for publication.

Manuscript length

Regular research articles. Regular articles must not exceed 16,000 words, which approximates 40 journal pages. The count should include abstract, examples and tables, references, and notes, but not supplementary materials to be published online only. Affiliations including department, institution, city, country and email addresses for all authors should be included. Corresponding author should be identified. Count figures as equivalent to 150 words each. The editors have found that the most accurate method for counting words in pdfs generated from TeX documents is to paste the text into a Word document.

Squibs. Squibs should not exceed 4,000 words, including examples and tables, references, and notes, which approximates 10 journal pages. Count figures as equivalent to 150 words each.

Book Reviews. Book Reviews should generally not exceed 3,000 words.

Number of submissions

At any given time, authors may have up to two papers in review. If you have two submissions under review at the same time, at least one of them must be co-authored.

Author information

The ScholarOne portal will request information from authors during the submission process. This includes details of the author’s or authors’ name(s), affiliation(s) and full postal and e-mail address(es); the manuscript itself should be fully anonymized. Acknowledgements and a competing interest declaration should not be included in the paper, but provided separately.

Data and replicability

Authors must provide sufficient information on data collection for the editors and reviewers to evaluate it. Depending on the source of data, this may include details regarding the consultants (number, dialect, region, age, etc.), the experimental design, the search procedures, or the other data collection methods used.

Where the data is not or cannot be made publicly available, (and there are often good reasons why it is not), authors should explain why it is not made available, typically in a footnote in the paper. If the data is archived, authors should provide the archival information. If secondary sources are used, sourcing information must be provided for every example, including page numbers if the source has them. Use of tertiary sources, such as textbooks, encyclopedias, and second-hand reports, is discouraged.

Generally speaking, articles reporting results of empirical studies such as quantitative analyses or experimental results should allow replication by other researchers based upon the article's contents, references, and any supplementary materials that can be made available, such as data files where feasible, software code, statistical analysis, and additional materials (e.g., R markdown files, python scripts, etc.). Authors have the option of providing these supplementary materials (suitably anonymised) at the point of submission, and are encouraged to do so in cases where they may be useful to reviewers in making a fully informed appraisal of the paper.

Manuscript preparation

Style

It is not necessary that initial submissions adhere rigidly to the style sheet below. At this point in the process, clear and consistent presentation is paramount.

Notes and acknowledgements

Notes should be kept to a minimum, and contain as few examples as possible. Acknowledgements in the published version of a paper will appear in a first note, marked with an asterisk after the title of the paper.

Section headings

All sections and subsections should have a heading. Section headings should be numbered as in the following:

1 Sign language prosody
1.1 The prosodic component of sign language grammar
1.1.1 Prosody of the intonational phrase in sign language

Levels lower than these should be avoided.

If the first section of a paper is titled ‘Introduction’, this section should be numbered 1, not 0.

Examples, tables, figures, etc.

All illustrative material (with the exception of tables and figures) should be treated as examples, and should be numbered consecutively throughout the text. Tables and figures should have a caption. It is not necessary to put examples, tables or figures on separate pages, except when they are very large. Please ensure that fonts used for text in figures (e.g., titles, axis labels and values) are large enough to be easily read, and that the typeface used is one of Times, Times New Roman, Doulos SIL or TeX Gryre Termes

For further information, please see the Cambridge University Press Journals artwork guide.

Underlining, italicisation, etc.

Underline or italicise examples included in the text; glosses of non-English examples should immediately follow the example, and be enclosed in single quotation marks. Small capitals should be used to identify technical terms; quotation marks or single underlining should not be used for this purpose.

Quotations

Include short quotations in the text, enclosed in single quotation marks. Longer quotations should begin a new line and be indented. Double quotation marks should only be used for quotations within quotations.

Brackets and phonetic symbols

Enclose phonetic transcriptions, which should be no narrower than is necessary for the purpose, in [ ] brackets. Phonemic or more ‘remote’ representations should be given in / /. Where orthography is under discussion, spelling forms should be enclosed in < >. Italicised and boldface phonetic symbols should be avoided.

Phonetic transcriptions should, wherever possible, make use of the symbols and conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet (as revised in 2005). If unusual symbols are used, these should be clearly indicated.

Spelling

Spelling conventions used in Phonology are those of British English. All -ize and -ise suffixes appear as ‑ise.

Bibliographical references in the text

Reference in the text should be to author(s) and date, and, where appropriate, chapter, section or page number(s), as in the following: Davidson (2006: 110), Pater et al. (2007), Hayes & Wilson (2008: §4.2.1), Gallagher (2010a, b). Lists such as these should be given in chronological order. References occurring in parentheses should have the following form: (Gallagher 2010a, b). References to publications by more than two authors should use the form with et al. Unpublished works should be referred to as (Jones, forthcoming) or (Jones, in press) where the work has been accepted for publication; otherwise, the reference should be to (Jones, in preparation) or (Jones, ms).

References

An alphabetically ordered list of all (and only) the works referred to in the text and notes should follow the notes. Authors’ names should be given in the form used in the cited publication. References should take the following form:

Boersma, Paul & David Weenink (2019). Praat: doing phonetics by computer. Version 6.0.49. http://www.praat.org/.

Gallagher, Gillian (2010a). The perceptual basis of long-distance laryngeal restrictions. PhD dissertation, MIT.

Gallagher, Gillian (2010b). Perceptual distinctness and long-distance laryngeal restrictions. Phonology 27. 435–480.

Hayes, Bruce (1980). A metrical theory of stress rules. PhD dissertation, MIT. Distributed 1981, Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Hermans, Ben (2011). The representation of word stress. In van Oostendorp et al. (2011). 980–1002.

Hulst, Harry van der (2011). Pitch accent systems. In van Oostendorp et al. (2011). 1003–1026.

Keyser, Samuel Jay & Kenneth N. Stevens (2001). Enhancement revisited. In Michael J. Kenstowicz (ed.) Ken Hale: a life in language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 271–291.

Kingston, John & Mary E. Beckman (eds.) (1990). Papers in laboratory phonology I: between the grammar and physics of speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McCarthy, John J. (1988). Feature geometry and dependency: a review. Phonetica 45. 84–108.

McCarthy, John J. & Alan S. Prince (1993). Prosodic morphology I: constraint interaction and satisfaction. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst & Rutgers University.

Oostendorp, Marc van, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice (eds.) (2011). The Blackwell companion to phonology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Pater, Joe, Rajesh Bhatt & Chris Potts (2007). Linguistic optimization. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Available (April 2013) at http://people.umass.edu/pater/pater-bhatt-potts-hg07.pdf.

Prince, Alan (2002). Entailed ranking arguments. Ms, Rutgers University. Available as ROA-500 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.

Prince, Alan & Paul Smolensky (1993). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell.

Steriade, Donca (1987). Redundant values. CLS 23:2. 339–362.

Warner, Natasha (1999). Syllable structure and speech perception are inter-related. Paper presented at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Los Angeles.

Page numbers should be given in full for all references to articles in journals or edited volumes. Edited volumes should appear as separate entries if reference is made to more than one paper in the volume; otherwise, they should appear in the form given for Keyser & Stevens (2001) above.

Abbreviations in references

The following periodical titles should be cited in abbreviated form:

BLS (Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, Berkeley Linguistics Society)
CLS (Papers from the Annual Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society)
IJAL (International Journal of American Linguistics)
JASA (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)
JL (Journal of Linguistics)
JPh (Journal of Phonetics)
Lg (Language)
LI (Linguistic Inquiry)
NELS (Papers from the Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society)
NLLT (Natural Language and Linguistic Theory)
WCCFL (Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics).

No full stops should be used in these abbreviations. All other periodical titles should be given in full.

Final files

If your manuscript has been accepted for publication and you are submitting final files, please review the 'Submitting your materials' page and the checklist on how to prepare final files.

Last updated: 09 October 2024

Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.

Previous publication and concurrent submission

Any material submitted to Phonology must be original work. Submission of an article is taken to imply that the material therein has not previously been published as a journal article or as part of a larger publication, is not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere, and will not be submitted elsewhere while it is under review for Phonology.

Previous appearance of related work in a conference proceedings does not preclude publication in Phonology. Work published in such a venue may be considered, provided that the journal submission is substantially more elaborated than the proceedings paper in terms of content, analysis and/or discussion.

In such cases, it is the responsibility of the author to inform the editors at the time of submission that part or all of the manuscript is based on previously published work. The submission should be accompanied by a brief explanation of how the submitted manuscript differs from previous published versions and how much it overlaps with them. Appearance in non-peer-reviewed working papers volumes and online archives (e.g. the Rutgers Optimality Archive or LingBuzz) does not constitute prior publication; nevertheless, it is helpful if it is drawn to the attention of the editors.

Failing to point out non-trivial overlap with previous publications means that the author is in violation of the policy of the journal. If an author has any question about how these rules apply to a particular submission, it is always best to check with the editors beforehand.

English language editing services

Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.

In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.

Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.

Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

For co-authored papers accepted for publication, the journal encourages the inclusion of an 'Author Contributions' section to detail the roles each co-author played in the publication. Authors may choose to use the CRediT taxonomy.

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

ORCID

We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.

If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.