JAPN 438P: Topics in Japanese Pragmatics: Speech Acts and Politeness

The APA Citation Style (published by the American Psychological Association (APA)) is most often used for social sciences research, such as Linguistics. You may use the APA Citation Style for your JAPN 438A class, so this page will provide you with course specific examples of in-text and bibliographic citations, as well as with APA Style resources. See the boxes below for more information.

APA In-text Citations Basics

In-text citations are citations that appear in the text of your essay and refer to a specific idea, quote, or page. APA uses parenthetical citations -- this means APA in-text citations put the relevant citation information in parentheses before the end of the sentence but before the period (i.e. like this).

For APA style, if you are referring to an idea from another work but NOT directly quoting the material, you only have to make reference to the author and year of publication and not the page number in your in-text reference.

• Example: Hayao Miyazaki was 17 years old when he decided he wanted to be an animator (Greenberg, 2018).

If, however, you are directly quoting the material, you will need to reference the author, the publication year, and the page number in your in-text reference. Singular pages should be indicated by p. and multiple pages should be indicated by pp.

• Example: The author asserts that when we are thinking about how to teach English to Japanese first language speakers, we must "[concentrate] not on the effects of linguistic interference through language transfer, but rather on the effects of linguistic interference through cultural transfer" (Conlan, 1996, p. 740). 

Bibliographic citations appear at the end of an essay -- APA style calls this the Reference List and should be formatted as its own separate page at the of the essay simply titled, References. Bibliography entries should all contain these basic elements:

• Author(s) name
• Title of work
• Date of work
• Location of work (page numbers for physical items, DOI or URL for electronic items).

Reference Lists should also follow specific formatting requirements. References should be: double spaced; use the hanging indent (the first line is not indented but the following lines are); authors' names should be listed by last name, and authors' first and middle names should be written as initials. Here are examples for a book, an article, and a movie citation (in this order):

Ohashi, J. (2013). Thanking and politeness in Japanese : balancing acts in interaction. Palgrave Macmillan.

Shibamoto-Smith, J. S. (2011). Honorifics, “politeness,” and power in japanese political debate. Journal of

          Pragmatics, 43(15), 3707–3719. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2011.09.003

Miyazaki, H. (1989). Kiki's Delivery Service [Motion Picture]. Japan: Toei Company.