Linguistics Editing and Proofreading Services

The paper's argument turns on the fact that one sentence is ungrammatical and a very similar one is fine. The sentences appear in the text with an asterisk and without, unglossed, untranslated, and with no indication of who judged them. A reader who does not speak the language cannot evaluate the claim, and a reader who does may simply disagree.

We edit what linguists write — descriptive grammars and grammatical sketches, syntax and semantics papers, phonetics and phonology studies, sociolinguistic and variationist research, historical and comparative linguistics, corpus and computational work, fieldwork documentation and language archiving, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on the example and everything that has to travel with it.

The numbered example is the unit of evidence in linguistics, and its failure is a data point a reader cannot check. An example carries a claim, and the claim is only as good as what accompanies it. We work through these so examples are glossed morpheme by morpheme with a consistent set of abbreviations and a free translation, since a reader of another language can only follow the argument through the gloss; so the alignment of the gloss to the source line is maintained so that each morpheme sits under its own, as broken alignment is the single commonest defect in submitted linguistics manuscripts; so the source of a judgement is stated — the author's own intuition, a named consultant, elicitation, a corpus token or an experiment — because these differ in status and readers weigh them differently; so the variety and speaker are identified where relevant, given that a judgement holds for a variety and not for a language; so corpus examples are cited with enough reference for retrieval and given in their original form; so the diacritics, transcription system and orthography are stated and used consistently; and so the contrast the example is meant to show is stated explicitly rather than left to the asterisk. Papers written this way can be argued with by people working on other languages.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished fieldwork, recordings and consultant identities. We are editors rather than linguists, and we offer no view on analyses, judgements or transcription. What we can do is make each example carry its own evidence.