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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 212
should be given. Thus the Yearbook of Morphology 1995 was actually published
in 1996, and should be cited as 1996.
Books are not quite as straightforward. The date of publication will normally
be found on the reverse of the title page, at least in books published
recently in English. Where a book has been published in several editions, there
are two competing conventions. One is that the dates of each of the editions
will be listed, in which case you should cite the last new edition. The other is
that dates will be given such as ‘1978; 1974’. This means that the current
edition was published in 1978, based on an earlier 1974 edition.
If it is important — for example, to illustrate the order in which ideas were
put forward — you can indicate the date of the first edition of a work as well as
the date of the edition being cited. This is done as follows:
(5) Fromkin, Victoria A. & Robert Rodman (1978 [1974]). An Introduction
to Language. Second edition. New York, etc.: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston.
The first date represents the date of the edition whose page numbers you will
cite in in-text references; the date in square brackets is the original date of publication.
Sometimes scholars put both dates in the in-text references, using the
same notation as in (5). Note the addition of the comment ‘Second edition’,
which may be abbreviated, e.g. as ‘2nd edn.’. This type of reference may be
especially important in citing works which have a very long publication history,
such as Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale or Paul’s Prinzipien der
Sprachgeschichte. It may also be used when you are citing a paper by a particular
author which has been collected in a series of papers. While you need the
edition you are citing for page references, you may also want to note the original
date of publication. So Twaddell’s paper on defining the phoneme from
1935, reprinted in Joos’s 1957 collection Readings in Linguistics, might be listed
as Twaddell (1957 [1935]).
It is important to note that it is the date of the publication which is required,
not the date of the printing. This may be of particular importance in two situations.
The first is where a distinction is made between, for example, the second
edition and the third impression. It is the date for the edition which is needed;
‘impression’ just means it has been reprinted. The second arises more often
with books published in non-English-speaking countries, where you may find,
sometimes on the last page of the book, something saying ‘Printing completed
on’ and then a date. While that date of printing may match the year of publication,
it cannot be assumed that it does. If you are in doubt about the year of
publication, but have hints such as these, you may prefer to mark the year of
publication as ‘c. 1936’, though your in-text reference would probably still be
‘1936’.