How to write a good background section in a linguistics paper

Becoming a research linguist is a rough business. When graduate students enter into a linguistics program, they have all sorts of different background experience. Within 3-4 years, students learn an immense amount about most linguistic fields, gain expertise in methods associated with those areas, specialize in a given area, learn about statistical methods (usually) and/or field methods, learn enough computational skills to do some research, and then are tasked with coming up with an original research plan for their dissertation. Unlike fields like philosophy or history, the amount of background a beginning graduate student has in linguistics can vary immensely. We ask them to do a lot.

In the process of becoming a "card-carrying linguist" (to quote something Arthur Abramson used to say), students also have to learn how to write effectively. Over the past several years, I have watched students struggle with the writing process. They often can discuss statistical models and advanced methods without much difficulty - these technical bits of our technical field. Yet, these are far less of a challenge for them than the process of consolidating past research into a background section. It's this bit I want to discuss here.

We could get into why this has become so difficult for younger students and early career professionals. Maybe it has something to do with how much reading is expected or how much this is not automateable. (AI is notoriously bad about inventing references and hallucinating findings - the precise things that you should not do in a background section.) I think though that the better question is why writing a thorough background section matters. Understanding the answer to this will get us on the right track for seeing how to effectively construct one.

1. Why does it matter?

Simply put, a well-constructed background section provides you with a big set of possible answers, analyses, and discussion for your data. You want these possible answers because your results will always be messier than you anticipate. You want the possible analyses because there are things you have not considered. You will seldom be able to fall back on a simple confirmatory "My findings confirm Hypothesis A. End of story." (And come to think of it, maybe our addiction to overly-curated data in linguistics is partly to blame.)

If your findings match some previous research (articles a, b, c) but not others (articles d, e, f), you can use your discussion section to argue how your work fits in with that of articles a, b, and c. Perhaps your approach is novel whereas past approaches were very uniform. You would only know that though if you've discussed methods used in past research in a background section. Fundamentally, your ability to discuss the importance of your work is dependent on knowing the literature.

It's clear to readers when this fails. Maybe you never structured your data the way it is done in past research and you therefore have a fundamental flaw in your design. You only discover this when you give a talk or when you go to submit your article to a journal. That's not only embarrassing, but it is a massive waste of time and money. Maybe you have no explanation for your findings when it comes to discussing them. Your discussion section is therefore filled with rambling speculation instead of doing what it should be doing - telling us why your findings are important and situating them within the canon of work on the topic. Scientific argumentation matters and it can only be done in relation to past knowledge.

I have done quite a bit of reviewing over the years and have served as an associate editor as well. I have seen papers get rejected because of things that were missed in the past literature, from simply not knowing much of the past literature, and, my personal pet peeve, from believing in the superiority of one's approach over all others while simultaneously not discussing any past work. Hubris can (and usually should) kill a research paper.

2. How do I go about this?

I won't say that I'm an expert at the writing process, but I'm a mid-career linguistics professor and I have a decent number of publications to my name. I have recognized several methods for how to construct a well-written background section.

2.1  Read it all or read with specific purpose in mind

To begin, let's talk about reading with purpose. There is a lot to be said about how to select a research topic, but I'm going to assume that you have chosen a good one. A good one has at least some background literature - even if it is on a different language from the one you are studying. You can approach reading a research article one of two ways - either read it in its entirety or read specific sections that are relevant to your paper (i.e. methods, analysis, results, theory, etc). 

There is always a strong inclination to skim abstracts to discover findings in the literature. At times, I have found this to be useful but most often it only helps to remind myself of details that I've already read. Perhaps you wish to skim just to identify in your writing that there is more work on the topic which you will not discuss. This is a fine use of skimming, but this type of reading and referencing should be minimized. Like, do it once or maybe twice in your paper and that's it.

Why read for depth? It's extremely easy to miss important details when you skim the abstract. I've seen authors mis-cite past work for this reason. This is embarrassing and it will make readers lose respect for you if they notice it. As a beginning scholar, you also are mostly unaware of how much other scholars in your field know about past work. You might assume that "no one will notice", but people do notice. Perhaps more importantly, you can not construct a meaningful background discussion from just abstracts alone. You will end up stating insipid things like "There is work done on this topic (a, b, c, ...)", which just gives "I couldn't be bothered to read this" vibes. Your background section should address technical details from past studies as they will inform your approach and your work. You don't get that from the abstract.

2.2  Type up main points / learn how to outline from your reading

Try to type up short summaries from each section of a paper that you read. You will retain a lot more from what you've read by doing this than if you choose to only highlight parts of the text. A short summary can be one sentence or two. Repeat this process until you finish the paper. The end product of your reading is probably a good summary of the entire research article. 

There are two benefits to this practice. First, the practice of taking notes as you read forces you to stay focused while reading something technical and is a natural way to include breaks into your reading. If you have a hard time focusing, this can be good practice. Second, you probably won't have to go back to the original article to recall what the findings were (you'll go back to your summary document). That saves time down the road. 

What do you include in a summary? Aside from the obvious, if you have comments and questions about things you've read, put these down (as a side note). If you found that there is a particularly relevant citation from your reading, make a note of it. It also might tell you the most natural article to read next and summarize. 

How much longer does this take than just reading it without taking notes? It depends on how deep you want to go. I usually find that if an academic article takes me 1 - 1.5 hours to read, then including notes adds 30 minutes or so. 

2.3  Construct your background section into sub-sections around questions/topics

You've done a good bit of reading, but it feels meandering. What is important to talk about? What is relevant to a discussion? How much theory do I include? Research questions have to be specific to be testable. There is an inclination to believe that your research question only narrowly relates to your specific area of research. Or, conversely, to believe that it answers a fundamental question about language. However, research questions in linguistics are never interesting because they address just one thing. Just as there are layers to every topic, there can be several sub-sections in a background section.

Ideally, the background section has a structure like the following:

1. General/big questions as the opener (make this 2-3 paragraphs, max)
    a. summary of research on the first topic
    b. summary of research on the second topic
    c. summary of research on the third topic
    d. motivation for your study on the basis of past work

To illustrate this, let's consider an example. I work on speech prosody. Let's say that I'm looking at how tones are produced in different parts of an utterance in Language X. Maybe tones involve greater pitch earlier in the utterance since pitch tends to lower across declarative utterances in many different languages. Maybe tones are hyperarticulated (pronounced more clearly) in the beginning of the utterance than later? We know that consonants can be pronounced more clearly at the beginning of an utterance.

What is the background literature for this research question? It is certainly "how tone is realized in Language X", but that's entirely too narrow, especially if there is limited work on the particular language. So, take a step outward. Maybe that step is towards "how tone is realized in the language family of Language X." That's probably a good sub-section for your background section. It also gives you particular writing goals for that section. Minimally, for each related language, you would have to talk about (a) what the phonological tone pattern is (b) how its production was tested in different positions of the utterance, and (c) what the results indicate. After you do this for each related language, you finish by summarizing your summaries.

There is a 2024 paper in the Journal of Phonetics by Alif Silpachai on whether the tones of Thai are influenced by utterance/sentence-initial position. The background section is well-written. What do the sections look like?

1. Introduction (2 large paragraphs)
    a. The domain of domain-initial strengthening (3 paragraphs)
    b. The domain of domain-initial strengthening in tone languages (largest sub-section)
    c. Tones in other contexts (2 paragraphs)
    d. Thai (2 paragraphs)
    e. This study (2 paragraphs)

Right away, we notice something about the layering I mentioned above. Section (a) is about the general theoretical topic in phonetics - domain-initial strengthening. Section (b) is about how this is implemented in a sub-domain - for tones in tone languages. Section (c) is about other studies on tone that are relevant but where perhaps domain-initial position was not explicitly tested. (This is perhaps a kind of "leftover" section.) Section (d) narrows it down to past work just on Thai, the language being studied here. Section (e) is that motivation for the current study that I mention above. These are all layers of the research domain and they can be sectioned this way in writing a background.

Within each section, the author starts off with a general picture across the studies that they discuss. This is usually just 2 sentences. Then the section provides detailed summaries of each of the past papers. In Silpachai's section (b) (1.1.1 in their paper), the begin by stating: 

The domain of DIS is not well understood in a tone language because it is unclear whether DIS modulates tone production. If DIS influences tones, its domain should extend beyond the initial segment in a tone language, particularly in the domain-initial CV where the tone is realized on the vowel. Previous studies have shown that a prosodic boundary can affect the realization of tones, but research on whether DIS modulates tones has been limited. 

There is a prediction here for how domain-initial strengthening should work alongside a generalization that there isn't much work on the question. He then proceeds to describe in detail the findings from three different research papers that do discuss the topic. Your job in one of these background sections is to do just this. Provide a 3-5 sentence description of past work and mention how it relates to your research question.

Within Silpachai's discussion is a critique of some of the methods used in past work - does the past work really target his research question in the same way? Were some aspects of past findings unclear? How? At this point, I want you to remember that note I gave you about jotting down your observations and points of confusion when you were taking notes on individual articles. These may be relevant for your background section. Though, keep in mind that your job is not to trash past work on your topic, but to provide some critique as it relates to your research question. No research article will ask the same exact question you're asking in the same exact way. We expect some critique, but be sure to provide it with grace. No paper is perfect, even the one you're writing.

How do you end a sub-section? Summarize again. Talk about methodological differences as they might be relevant to your question. Or maybe you save a review of methods for its own sub-section in your background section. This is especially good as it motivates your choice of methods in the paper you're writing. Papers often get rejected for methodological issues, so it is important to examine them. Silpachai ends his section (b) with:

Taken together, previous studies have shown some possible DIS effects on tones, but due to the limited data and given the discussion above, more studies are needed to better understand DIS effects on tones. This understanding should not only encompass nontonal languages but also extend to tone languages, such as Thai as explored in the present study.

I would like to highlight that this summary of past work is not revealing something "ground-breaking." Perhaps there is no general picture that emerges from the three studies he evaluated, but this motivates the need for more empirical work on the question he is pursuing in his study.

2.4 Putting things together

The method of sectioning off by topic/domain is crucial to organizing your writing. An unstructured background section reads like a brain dump of 101 different articles. No common thread is present to organize them. As you prepare to organize your readings along these lines, be sure to create a detailed outline. You might consider intentionally including the citations alongside your subsections. Following the example from Silpachai, this might look something like:

The domain of domain-initial strengthening in tone languages (largest sub-section)
    -What does Pan (2009) say about Taiwanese?
    -What does Cao and Zheng (2006) say about Mandarin? Li (2015)?
    -Describe and then talk about limitations. How do these relate to my research?

The methods I've described here work reasonably well for many different types of research papers in linguistics, but there certainly is no one-size-fits-all approach. I've seen researchers divide up their background sub-sections into "support for theory A" and then "support for theory B." Some authors have multiple background sections for describing theories/approaches and for describing the language they are studying. There is no one way to structure things, but it is important to structure things.

Making friends in and out of academia

It's hard to make friends as you get older. You either end up falling back towards old friends who you've known since you were younger or towards casual acquaintances who you might share a drink with. Or maybe you start a hobby and you meet people doing this. Maybe they're still casual acquaintances though. Maybe they only want to talk... about the hobby. Sigh.

I make a lot of friends as an academic. Or, maybe I get along with lots of people and we see each other at occasional conferences and on social media. With some, I find myself wrapped up in an extended conversation about an academic topic - or - I find they're not interested in extending the conversation outside of the limits of shop-talk. We never stray far from that. After years of talking, should we be ashamed to admit that we just don't know much else about each other? Do I send them a birthday card? Or are we just each others' eternal sounding boards? (There are worse things to be.) People stay at arm's length.

I never really did casual friendships. The deep or intimate relationships, the friendships where you find yourself texting the other person randomly mid-week and it connects to some old conversation you both had - these are the ones I have always sought. I figure that I'm always too intense for anything else. You call each other randomly to vent and you get each other. They cry and you lift them up. You carry each others' hearts along as you grow older. Your threads are woven as chosen family. They're golden friendships.

I've had the luck of having a couple of these friendships inside and outside of academia. I suppose I'm having a dry spell now for the first time in many years and it's a bit lonely. I remember really really connecting with some friends in grad school and one friend when I was a postdoc, but circumstances eventually shifted. People move or get new jobs. Maybe you discover that the person who you confided in doesn't need you as much you need them. Maybe that's gradual, but maybe it's abrupt. It's painful either way.

The hardest relationships to mourn have been those where I have let someone in completely. They were as aware of all my preoccupations as I was aware of their anxieties. It was easy enough to drift between personal struggles, humor, and then into questions about topics in linguistics. Is it healthy to make deep friendships with people you also have close professional ties with? 

We're supposed to shrug here and pretend that we're not hurt when these types of relationships end. At least for my (former) close academic friends, I have this weird, robotic sense that I shouldn't miss them or that I shouldn't mourn things changing. What if I do though? We don't call it a lost love, as we so often reserve that word for other people, but really, that's what it is.

I find myself questioning what makes things persist or perish? I have a tendency to be a close listener with others and try to give people advice. So, I have ended up serving the role of "mental health pipeline" with past friends. When the relationship drifts or ends, was it because I no longer wanted to serve this role? Or was this the only reason that people wanted to talk with me to begin with? Am I loyal to a fault?

There's a myth that introverts don't need people as much as extroverts do. It's been my experience that we often need people more, actually, but we value quality over quantity. I'm prone to deep thinking and deep feeling, to people with questions.  And when things end, I can't help falling back into old tropes about how hard it was to make friends when I was younger, back when it was supposed to be easier.

What exists anymore?

Is there a department of education? Will children have to take tests anymore? Can high school drop-outs now teach high school? Are there standards or something else instead? Are all future teachers required to bring AK-47s to class and excel in leading children in active shooter drills? Does that require the ability to read? Do we care about reading still if ChatGPT does it for us anyways? Are you a human reading this?

Is there a national science foundation? I heard they no longer have a physical building. Most programs were cut. Maybe next year they will no longer exist but they are currently still funding just what was previously promised. Maybe there will be no online portal, so no one will know if they exist still. Maybe no one will reviews. Maybe reviews won't matter as long as you don't use the word "trans" anywhere.

Is there a national institute of health? Is there research on cancer anymore? What about hearing loss? What about vaccines or ebola? I mean, when I was a kid, ebola was scary. The pandemic was scary. What are the plans instead? Are we just going with health "vibes" now? Does anyone with a medical degree or phd still work for them?

Is there an FDA? Is it now safe to put anti-freeze in wine like they did in that one episode of the Simpsons? Should I expect my tomato sauce to contain high levels of mercury? I heard that apparently asbestos is no longer illegal and that sounds like very dangerous stuff. Does someone work at the FDA?

Do we have a right to a lawyer in court? Can I say that the president is a pathological liar and evil jerk and not be put on a list of "potential dissidents"? Do I have free speech as I used to understand it as a child? Does the white house print the bill of rights on all of its toilet paper or just what the president uses?

And while my escapist dreams flow, does the FAA exist still? or is someone who once watched a lot of piloting tiktok videos in charge of air traffic control now? Are women allowed to be pilots still? or black people?

Does the EPA still exist? Should I come to expect high levels of toxic algae and arsenic in the tap water? Are companies now allowed to dump sulfuric acid into every river? Does anyone test the air for its quality or have we given up on that idea altogether? Does the person now in charge of that office consult with chemists and environmentalists? or just lobbyists?

And as long as we're outside, can I go to the park? or are they all closed for mining? Do park rangers still exist?

And is there immigration still? Are you screened for your skin color before you consider moving into the Divided States of America? Apparently people still are going to naturalization ceremonies, but are they still considered citizens if they disagree with anyone who is white?

Do actual journalists go to executive office press hearings? or do they mostly just low-ball the malicious correspondent who hates to talk to people? Are questions allowed that are not preceded by "Bless our dearest leader"? Do newspapers take any of the answers seriously? Are facts allowed?

Do my taxes pay for anything that serves me? Or is most of the money used for the military and to fund American concentration camps and its gestapo? Does the American gestapo get paid by the number of wrists they zip-tie? or by the number of small children they toss into jail cells? I hear that it's easier to kidnap children if they don't know to ask for your identification. Does identification still matter or are we going with gestapo vibes instead? Does the gestapo get paid vacation? 

What exists anymore? Nothing is obvious to me, so any help would be appreciated.

Springtime haikus

 The dandelions

commit no sins by growing

high enough for bees

The bees only want

to bask in all the flowers 

stop mowing them down

Turn your lawnmower

into funky garden gnomes

nature does the rest

Monoculture grass

is anti-diversity

your lawn is a crime

In the boat together

There's a prolific scene in the movie Titanic where the band continues to play while the ship is sinking. If they know the ship is sinking, do they continue because their employers want it? because they are avoiding such terror by distracting themselves with something banal? because of their commitment to making music in spite of their world ending? because it is all they could choose to do in the face of terror?

I'm caught in how much this is an apt scene for how things feel right now. Is the boat sinking for research and scholarship in the United States? If so, what motivates the choices we make to continue doing what we're trained to do? what we're passionate about? Do these things matter relative to the fear of the moment?

Universities would have you believe that what remains motivating is some sort of commitment to the institution or "because you're paid to do it." That's bs, of course. Certain institutions might engender such faith, but most don't. Are we free to choose our passions at this moment then? or does that seem selfish relative to all the other areas where we can choose to protest or serve people?

(I realize in writing this that the notion of doing something for yourself being equated with selfishness is a persistent affliction of me growing up Catholic that I still have to kick.)

Universities would also have you believe that you find motivation in the "big picture" questions in your field. These things can be inspiring in the short term, but are often not that motivating in the long run. Instead, it seems to be how much we connect with others around our interests that seems to motivate me. Am I regularly making progress on some interesting research topic? Am I spending time each week talking about my field with colleagues? with other experts? with long-time friends? Am I helping students in a lab work on their data analysis issues? These are also the things providing me some sense of purpose.

And so maybe it isn't a sense of duty that kept the band playing on the bridge of the Titanic, or some vague notion that they were committed to beauty amidst terror. Maybe it was just a commitment to support each other still playing that gave them motivation and purpose. Maybe it is always about others.

A retention of faith

What does it mean to retain one's faith? Is it faith in oneself? in your community? in society? in others? in a deity of some sort? Do we have to have faith and trust in ourselves before we have it in our communities? Or is it the other way around? Might we not have faith in ourselves if we see no examples of it around us?

Following the election, I am troubled by what is a gradual unfolding of that faith in my country, in institutions that are supposed to be motivated by justice and common good instead of by avarice and personal vengeance. If this country is only about greed and selfishness, then I gradually find myself at odds with it, a stranger floating adrift among other strangers. And if I find community among strangers, how do you re-form (or reform) a community on the basis of beliefs you all thought everyone shared?

Does that crisis of faith in some abstract type of thing - a country as a concept - trickle down into other abstract notions like society? Does it trickle down into things of substance like communities or the people at the grocery store? to my students? to my family?

There are the communities I live in - in New Haven, in Buffalo, among faculty and students at UB, among friend groups in different parts of the world, among family. I have needed to touch each community to check again and again if they remain intact, clinging onto the fabric for a bit asking "Do you also still believe in kindness? in noble pursuits?"

And if selfishness abounds while knowledge languishes at the margins, I find myself struggling against so much lost hope. Do I believe that students are fundamentally interested in learning still? Do I believe that I can do anything to prevent academic dishonesty in a world of easy AI answers? Should I even bother trying? Do I believe that work in my research and my field is worth pursuing while universities, institutions, and society (that diaphanous term) might flippantly dismiss such endeavors as wasteful or impractical? Why does it feel like my careful little efforts are like planting trees in a forest fire?

Or does the despair and lack of faith only trickle up? Does the individual losing faith become nothing but a black hole sucking all others into their vortex? Is this the nature of where faith goes? And as communities become lost to these cults of individualism, what is left to hold onto?

Research

Did you discuss your project proposal? Have you talked about it with colleagues? Have you revised it? Have you mulled it over in the shower, on your walk, in the wee hours of the morning?

Have you requested funding from a grant source? Did it take you 1-2 months to write a proposal and work with your university to submit all the paperwork in time? Did you wait 6 months to hear back about whether you got funded? If you did get funded, did you wait another 3 months to start the research?

Did you write up your protocol for the institutional review board at your university (if the work involves human subjects)? Did you have to revise this? Did it take you 3-4 weeks and did you pull your hair out trying to answer their questions?

Once you had the research funds, did you train students as research assistants? did you design experiments and run them? Have you finished collecting all your data? Did you stay late at the university again doing so?

Did you spend 6-9 months analyzing and re-analyzing your data, plotting your findings, doing statistics? Did you present these new findings at research conferences that you submitted to and then attended? Did your university not give you enough funds to attend the conference? Have you incorporated feedback from your colleagues now that you have findings?

Have you written up your results in a research paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal? Have you read the 10, 20, 30, 40 relevant articles that you cite in your background section? Are your findings well argued?

Did you wait 3-4 months to hear back from the journal? If the journal's decision was "revise and resubmit" or "major revisions", did you spend 2-3 months revising your manuscript to address the reviewers' concerns? Did you pull your hair out doing this too?

Did you repeat this process above to revise it yet again? Did the journal give you reviewers that advised you to do more than last time? Do you have any hair left?

If your paper was accepted after the 9-12 months for journal submission, review, and revision, did you also address all copyeditor commentary?

If this all has happened, congratulations, you have published an original piece of research. It took you 2-3 years and a huge amount of effort. Hopefully you can continue to do this on your grant.

Now, remind me, what was that again about your google "research" that you spent 30 minutes on?