How can I put part of my section/subsection heading into small caps?

Question

I want to to have section headings like

\section{-\textit{rqsa} `Affirmative suffix (\textsc{aff}'}

Note that there are dozen sections like this, so it's not just a solution for this one example.

However, as you all know, the \textsc doesn't work in this environment. Although many other Qs in this forum ask about small caps in section headings, they all want all of the text in small caps, whereas I only want part of the text in small caps.

\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage{cgloss4e}
\usepackage{phonrule}
\usepackage{gb4e}
\usepackage{tipa}
\usepackage[round]{natbib}
\setcitestyle{notesep{: }}
\setcitestyle{aysep={}}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\stepcounter{section} % So that the labels have different values
%\usepackage[table,xcdraw]{xcolor}
\usepackage[labelsep=space]{caption}
\usepackage{lineno}
 \usepackage{multirow}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{4}

\titleformat{\paragraph}
{\normalfont\normalsize\bfseries}{\theparagraph}{1em}{}
\titlespacing*{\paragraph}
{0pt}{3.25ex plus 1ex minus .2ex}{1.5ex plus .2ex}
\linenumbers

\begin{document}

\section{-\textit{rqsa} `Affirmative suffix (\textsc{aff}'}
xyz
\section{-\textit{awar} `Declarative suffix (\textsc{decl}'}
xyz
\end{document}

Thanks a lot for your advice!

Answer 1

This is because the font you are using does not contain bf+sc shape. Thus \textbf{\textsc{Text}} is just like \textbf{Text}

Try another font, for example:

\usepackage{newpxtext} % add this to your preamble

The result would be like:

There are many other fonts you can try, for example Times: \usepackage{times}. Here is a font list: The LaTeX Font Catalogue.