Quotations
A short quotation of up to 2-3 lines is put in quotation marks and integrated in the running text. The quotation is followed by a short reference to where it was taken from. This is an example of how you give a short quotation: "grammatical labels are very rarely appropriate for all instances of a category" (Halliday 2004: 199). The full reference of the book/article you are quoting from must be given in the reference list.
Longer quotations are written like this, with indentation. You do not use quotation marks, since the quotation is marked by the indentation. The reference to the work the quotation is taken from has to follow the quotation, as with shorter quotations. (author, year of publication, page number)
If you highlight a part of the quotation, you should state that the emphasis is your own, and did not appear in the original text. Example:
The theme extends from the beginning of the clause up to (and including) the first element that has a function in transitivity. This element is called the 'topical Theme'; so we can say that the Theme of the clause consists of the topical Theme together with anything else that comes before it. (Halliday 1994: 53, my emphasis)
If there is an error in the text that you are copying from, you can write a [sic!] immediately after the error.
If you need to change anything in a quotation (e.g. full noun phrase instead of pronoun) you mark the changes with square brackets, as in the below examples (from Ebeling & Hasselgård 2025). In the first case, some material has been omitted from the quotation, and in the second, a capital letter has been replaced by lower case.
- The first is known as translation bias (TB) and measures and compares ‘the degree of unidirectional correspondence displayed in the […] translations’ (Altenberg 1999: 254–255)
- Importantly, and as pointed out by Johansson (2007: 5), "[t]he use of bilingual and multilingual corpora, with a variety of texts and a range of translators represented, increases the validity and reliability of the comparison."
Making references
Note: This section outines a system which is common in linguistics publications. Instead of this system, you can use for example APA 7, which is also a common format, especially with the "Author-date" style. See https://apastyle.apa.org/.
When you refer to other people's work without quoting them directly, you insert a reference in brackets. Here are some examples of how you can do it:
- The theme is a 'containing inferable' (cf. Prince 1981: 236) which is related to the hypertheme of the text, thus preserving the thematic progression of the original. (The reference is given because the term is introduced and explained in that paper.)
- However, as has been pointed out in a number of studies (Thompson 1987, Matthiessen and Thompson 1988, Ford 1993), the syntactic subordination entails a backgrounding of an initial clause in relation to the main (or matrix) clause. (The reference is given in order to give examples of writers who have this view, and point the readers to where they can find it.)
- Syntactically, one of the most conspicuous differences between English and Norwegian sentence openings is that English has an even greater preference than Norwegian for subjects in initial position, and conversely, that Norwegian has a wider variety of sentence elements in initial position (Hasselgård 1997). (The reference is given because these things are explored in greater detail in that paper.)
Writing a reference list
Referring to books:
Author. Year of publication. Title of book in italics. Place of publication: Publisher.
Example: Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An introduction to functional grammar, 2nd ed.
Referring to book chapters:
Author. Year of publication. "Title of the paper with or without quotation marks, but in normal type". In Editor (ed.), Italicized title of book. pp. x.-x. Place of publication: Publisher.
Example: Virtanen, T. 1998. Direct questions in argumentative student writing. In S. Granger (ed.), Learner English on Computer, 94–106. London: Longman.
Note that the most recent versions of Chicago and APA do not require place of publication in references to books.
Referring to journal articles:
Author. Year of publication. "Title of the paper with or without quotation marks, but in normal type". In Italicized title of journal., Volume:issue, pp. x.-x.
Example: Hong, H. & F. Cao. 2014. Interactional metadiscourse in young EFL learner writing. A corpus-based study. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19:2, 201–224.
Referring to websites:
Author (if known/relevant). Name of website in italics. Date (if known) <Complete URL in angled brackets>. Time of access.
The Internet Grammar of English.< http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/home.htm>. Accessed October 2022.
The
Referring to unpublished material:
MA theses: Author. Year of submission. "Title of the thesis with or without quotation marks but in normal type." MA thesis,
Handouts: Author. Year. "Title with or without quotation marks but in normal type". Handout (+ date if known), Name of course, University of XX.
Examples:
Bøe, Sarah Gundhus. 2021. "Lexical Patterns in the Climate Discourse: A collocational network analysis of a subject-specific corpus." MA thesis, University of Oslo. http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-93871. Accessed October 2022.
Hasselgård, Hilde. 2022. Learner English discourse 1. Handout 05.10.2022, ENG4117. University of Oslo.
Capitalization in titles
It is relatively common, but not obligatory, to capitalize the content words in titles of books and periodicals, less often in titles of articles in books or journals. APA and Chicago have different practices on this. Whatever you choose, be consistent!
Examples:
The Internet Grammar of English,
Connectors and Sentence Openings in English and Swedish.
NB This is not standard practice with Norwegian titles, which are in lower case.
Example of reference list
Aijmer, K. 2013. Analysing modal adverbs as modal particles and discourse markers. In L. Degand, B. Cornillie & P. Pietandrea (eds), Discourse Markers and Modal Particles. Categorization and Description, 89-106. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad & E. Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Charles, M., D. Pecorari & S. Hunston (eds). 2009. Academic Writing. At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse. London: Continuum.
Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde. 2025. English GO and Norwegian GÅ: Lexicogrammatical patterns and translation paradigms. Languages in Contrast: International Journal for Contrastive Linguistics. doi: 10.1075/lic.00054.ebe.
Ebeling, S.O. & Heuboeck, A. 2007. Encoding document information in a corpus of student writing: the British Academic Written English Corpus. Corpora 2(2): 241-256.
Fløttum, K., T. Dahl, & T. Kinn. 2006. Academic Voices. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Granger, S. 2015. Contrastive interlanguage analysis: A reappraisal. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 1:1, 7-24.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.
Hasselgård, H. 2009. Thematic choice and expressions of stance in English argumentative texts by Norwegian learners. In K. Aijmer (ed.), Corpora and Language Teaching, 121-139. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Paquot, M., H. Hasselgård, S. O. Ebeling. 2013. Writer/reader visibility in learner writing across genres: A comparison of the French and Norwegian components of the ICLE and VESPA learner corpora. In S. Granger, G. Gilquin & F. Meunier (eds), Twenty Years of Learner Corpus Research: Looking back, Moving ahead, 377-387. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
Scott, M. 2012. WordSmith Tools version 6. Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software.
Simon-Vandenbergen, A.-M. & K. Aijmer. 2004. The expectation marker of course in a cross-linguistic perspective. Languages in Contrast 4:1, 13-44.
White, P. R. R. & A. Don. 2015. Appraisal Website Homepage. http://grammatics.com/appraisal/ (last accessed on 18 August, 2026).
Sources of material:
The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus: <http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/enpc/> Accessed October 2024.
The British National Corpus: <www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/> Accessed September 2025.
Leksikografisk bokmålskorpus: <https://www.hf.uio.no/humit/ressurser/lbk/>. Accessed October 2025.