APA7 Oxford comma again

Question

although I have looked for the solution on several other posts, I definitely fail to remove the Oxford comma before the "&" separating the last author (only when the order is "Name, F., & Name, F.", never when it's "F. Name & F. Name"); For example, instead of having :

Gildea , S., Luján , E. R., & Barðdal , J. (2020). The Curious Case of Reconstruction in Syntax. In J. Barðdal , S. Gildea & E. R. Luján (Éds.), Reconstructing Syntax (pp. 1-44). Brill.

I would like to have :

Gildea , S., Luján , E. R. & Barðdal , J. (2020). The Curious Case of Reconstruction in Syntax. In J. Barðdal , S. Gildea & E. R. Luján (éds.), Reconstructing Syntax (pp. 1-44). Brill.

My code is roughly as follows :

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage[variant=swiss]{french}

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=apa,doi=false,isbn=false,url=false,eprint=false]{biblatex}

\DefineBibliographyStrings{french}{%
  pages = {pp\adddot},
  editor = {Éd\addot},
  editors = {Éds\addot}
}

\nocite{*}
\addbibresource{bib.bib}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

And my bib.bib code is :

@incollection{GildeaReconstruction,
  title = {The {{Curious Case}} of {{Reconstruction}} in {{Syntax}}},
  booktitle = {Reconstructing {{Syntax}}},
  author = {Gildea, Spike and Luján, Eugenio R and Barðdal, Jóhanna},
  editor = {Barðdal, Jóhanna and Gildea, Spike and Luján, Eugenio R},
  date = {2020},
  pages = {1--44},
  publisher = {Brill},
  location = {Leiden}
}

I tried to add \DeclareDelimFormat{finalnamedelim}{\addspace\bibstring{and}\space} or \renewcommand*{\finalnamedelim}{\addspace\&\space} as suggested elswhere, but it doesn't work. Other posts say to check the .bst file, but because I have the biblatex-apa package, I don't know what to do.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

As discussed in Biblatex APA-7 Modification the comma you are seeing is not technically an Oxford comma. Instead it is apparently more reasonable to regard it as an appositive comma.

You can disable the comma by redefining \apablx@ifrevnameappcomma. If you use a language without Oxford comma, you won't have to do anything else. If your language does use the Oxford comma, you have to disable it (see Biblatex APA-7 Modification).

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage[variant=swiss]{french}

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=apa]{biblatex}

\makeatletter
\renewcommand*{\apablx@ifrevnameappcomma}[2]{#2}
\makeatother

\DefineBibliographyStrings{french}{%
  pages   = {pp\adddot},
  editor  = {Éd\adddot},
  editors = {Éds\adddot}
}

\nocite{*}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@incollection{GildeaReconstruction,
  title     = {The Curious Case of Reconstruction in Syntax},
  booktitle = {Reconstructing Syntax},
  author    = {Gildea, Spike and Luján, Eugenio R. and Barðdal, Jóhanna},
  editor    = {Barðdal, Jóhanna and Gildea, Spike and Luján, Eugenio R.},
  date      = {2020},
  pages     = {1--44},
  publisher = {Brill},
  location  = {Leiden},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}