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203 CITATION ETIQUETTE
How do I refer to something which is in another person’s book?
The general rule for citations is that you are citing the author of the work. If
you are referring to a work written by Joseph Greenberg but which appears in
a volume which has the names of Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine
on the cover, you refer to it as ‘Greenberg (1991)’ (the date comes from the
instance of this I know of). Your reference list will make it clear that the paper
by Greenberg appeared in a volume edited by Traugott and Heine. But they
did not write the material themselves, and so you do not refer to that paper
under their names. This principle also applies to things like entries in encyclopedias
if it is possible to discover the author of the individual entry: you should
refer by the name of the person who wrote the entry, not the name of the person
in charge of the encyclopedia.
How do I refer to unpublished work?
There are a number of types of unpublished work which you might want to
refer to. These include assignments (either your own, or those of fellow students),
theses, conference papers, works due for publication, websites, lectures,
discussions with other people from whom you are taking major ideas. Let us
deal with each of these in turn.
You can refer to your own and others’ assignments as you would refer to any
published piece of work. But instead of a place of publication, you should say
‘Assignment for [Course identifier] at [Institution name]’. So we might get a
reference such as the following:
Jones, Susan (2002). ‘How American is New Zealand English?’
Assignment for LING 322 ‘New Zealand English’ at Victoria
University of Wellington.
Theses and dissertations are referred to in precisely the same way. They are
usually treated as articles rather than as books (which is unexpected, but not
crucial), and specifically cited as being ‘unpublished’. (If they are subsequently
published, it is better to refer to the published version if possible, on the
grounds that it will be more easily available for an international audience.) The
nomenclature (‘thesis’ versus ‘dissertation’ etc.) should ideally follow that used
in the relevant institution, but if you have to guess, use ‘thesis’ for British,
Australian and New Zealand and ‘dissertation’ for American works. We thus
get references such as the following:
Matthewson, Lisa (1991). ‘An application of Autosegmental Morphology
to some nonconcatenative phenomena in Germanic languages.’
Unpublished MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.