There are some typographic conventions adhered to in most of linguistic literature where it applies. This includes punctuation affixes
- /phonemic/
- [phonetic] and [±feature]
- ⟨graphemic⟩ or <graphemic>
including quote marks
- ‘semantics’
- “quotation”
or just prefixes
- *wrong, *reconstructed, *ungrammatic
and also italic type
- object language, example
Other possibilities are employed by some scholars (in some fields) but not others, e.g.
typographic effects
- bold face
- serif/roman vs. 𝗌𝖺𝗇𝗌-𝗌𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖿/grotesque vs. cursive/𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝓅𝓉 vs. blackletter/𝔣𝔯𝔞𝔨𝔱𝔲𝔯
monospaced/fixed-width
- l e t t e r s p a c i n g
- u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲, l̶i̶n̶e̶-t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶, o̅v̅e̅r̅l̅i̅n̅e̅
letter case
- sᴍᴀʟʟ cᴀᴘs
- UPPERCASE
- Initial Caps
- InternalCaps
- camelCase
- snake_case (infix)
paired affixes
- {braces}
- (parentheses), ((doubled))
- ‹guillemets›, «guillemets», ›guillemets‹, »guillemets«
other prefixes
- ?question mark
- #hash sign
or separators (infixes)
- vertical|pipe
- middle·dot
and math-like “operators”
- <, >, =, ≈, …
or arrows
- →, ⇒, ←, ⇐, ↖, ↗, …
I have quite a collection of such semantic styles (sometimes conflicting), but it’s quite unsystematic yet and without authoritative source for the most part.
There are, of course, also conventions for supra/para-textual structures like diagrams, e.g. syntax trees and interlinear glosses, and tables, e.g. mandatory optimality theory tableaux with hand symbol ☞, small-caps in column headers and ugly cell borders. Leipzig Glossing Rules (LGR), for instance, employ single quote marks, space, hyphen, equals sign, uppercase/small-caps, period or underscore, semicolon, colon, backslash, greater than, digits, empty set symbol ∅, parentheses, angle brackets and tilde. Discourse transcriptions in conversion analysis follow complex conventions of their very own (CA, DT, GAT, HIAT, CHAT).
I still have not found meta research that produced an overview of linguistic typography. If there is, I will appreciate pointers very much. Until then, what kinds of typographic conventions, especially inside normal prose, are used in various linguistic fields besides the aforementioned standards?
Disclosure: I’m planning to design and implement a flavor of Markdown (or rather Commonmark / Scholarly Markdown) tailored to linguistics and would like to reuse or at least support as many existing conventions as possible, also see Markdown for linguistics?