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(Notes) Interlinear Gloss

The document discusses interlinear glossing, which involves placing a series of brief explanations or annotations in between the original text and its translation. It outlines the Leipzig Glossing Rules for formatting interlinear glosses, including aligning words and morphemes, using hyphens to separate morphemes, and labels for grammatical categories. The rules also address conventions for one-to-many correspondences between the original text and gloss. Interlinear glossing aims to provide a morpheme by morpheme analysis and translation of the original text.

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Nolan Jusayan
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89 views3 pages

(Notes) Interlinear Gloss

The document discusses interlinear glossing, which involves placing a series of brief explanations or annotations in between the original text and its translation. It outlines the Leipzig Glossing Rules for formatting interlinear glosses, including aligning words and morphemes, using hyphens to separate morphemes, and labels for grammatical categories. The rules also address conventions for one-to-many correspondences between the original text and gloss. Interlinear glossing aims to provide a morpheme by morpheme analysis and translation of the original text.

Uploaded by

Nolan Jusayan
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Prof. Nolan Severino R.

Jusayan, LPT, MAEd


[Notes] Linguistics

Topic: Glossing as a way to get familiar with some linguistic terms or abbreviations.

What is interlinear gloss?


1. Gloss is a series of brief explanations or annotations that is placed usually in the
second line [metalanguage] between the original transcript and its translation.
2. The original transcript is in the object language [linguistics] while the translation
is usually in the glossator’s language or the reader’s language.
3. There are conventions to follow when glossing; one such set of rules to follow is
from the joint Departments of Linguistics of Max Planck Institute and University
of Leipzig.
4. Interlinear glossing does not mainly entail any other labels beyond the standard
abbreviated ones as this does not involve syntactic analysis. Though there are
extra forms of labelling to present constituency [structure], they are put in
brackets. However, bracketing should be minimized (Lehmann, 2004)
5. Interlinear glossing would involve morpheme by morpheme analysis.
Morpheme is defined as the smallest morphological unit that cannot be further
subdivided. Inflections, affixes are an example.
How to do the interlinear glossing?
6. Interlinear glossing follows the canonical trilinear representation: L1 (object
language line), IMG (metalanguage line), and the free translation (3rd line)
7. Levels of Representation (Lehmann, 2004):
(a) raw data recording (video or audio tape),
(b) phonetic transcription of the utterance,
(c) orthographic representation of the utterance,
(d) morph(ophon)emic representation of the utterance,
(e) IMG of the utterance (Interlinear Morphemic Gloss),
(f) free translation of the utterance into the background language,
(g) descriptive and explanatory comment on pragmatic or cultural aspects of the
utterance.

To simplify: a-b) Analyze the object language in L1, c-e) Use metalanguage to do
the glossing, and f) do the translation. [g-should be employed when writing a
formal paper that concerns glossing].
8. Knowledge of the linguistic terms such as those published by Max Planck and
Leipzig U.
Leipzig Glossing Rules
9. Notes on the rules:
a. Rule 1. Word-by-word alignment – left aligned vertically.
b. Rule 2. Morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence – hyphens are used to
separate segmentable morphemes. If there are three segments in the object
language, the gloss line should also have three. Clitic boundaries can be
presented through an equal sign. Clitics are phonologically dependent on
another word.
i. Rule 2A. morphologically bound [as opposed to free morphemes]
elements have a distinct prosodic feature…use hyphen and space in
the object language line only.
c. Rule 3. Grammatical category labels – does not involve formal syntactic
analysis or parsing, but mainly categorizing morphemes based on the
function in which they are used.
d. Rule 4. One-to-many correspondences – periods are used to separate
several metalanguage. Formatting depends on various principles set in
different ways to gloss. Some of them are presented below:
i. Rule 4A. if the object language is not segmentable and the
metalanguage lacks a single-word translation, an underscore may
be used.
ii. Rule 4B. if an element in the unsegmentable object language has
two clear meaning syntactically or semantically, then a semi-colon
may be used.
iii. Rule 4C. if an object language element is segmentable, but the
author does not want to show the formal segmentation because it is
unnecessary for such purpose, a colon may be used.
iv. Rule 4D. if there is a morphophonological change in a grammatical
property in the object language [such as ablaut in English: sing,
sang, sung], the backslash is used.
v. Rule 4E. when it comes to person-number affixes [such as
possessive affixes] that express agent and patient-like arguments
[action and receiver, respectively], the right-angle bracket can be
used to separate and show them.
e. Rule 5. Person and number labels – person [abbreviation] should not be
separated with the number [abbreviation] labels.
f. Rule 6. Non-overt elements [such as non-overt subjects in early child
speech (Rizzi, 1994) when children of around age 2 years drop
determiners and auxiliary verbs…] may be presented using a null symbol
in the object language.
g. Rule 7. Inherent categories – such as gender [for example the G4=4th
gender=neuter…refer to grammatical gender] may be indicated in the
gloss line through the round parenthesis.
h. Rule 8. Bipartite elements – such as bipartite stems [present in some
languages such as the languages of western North America I have not
found one in English…refer to Jacobsen, 1980 & DeLancey, 1996] and
bipartite affixes [circumfixes=an affix placed in the beginning and end
there are some in the English language but mostly considered as archaic such as
‘a-hunting’]
i. Rule 9. Infixes – infixes are enclosed by angle brackets.
j. Rule 10. Reduplication – presented using a tilde that connects the copied
element [a repetition of a stem, a part of the word, or the whole word] to
the stem.

References:

Bickel, B., Comrie, B., & Haspelmath, M. (2015). The Leipzig glossing rules: conventions for
interlinear morpheme by morpheme glosses. Max Planck Institute.
https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php
DeLancey, S. (1996). Penutian in the bipartite stem belt: Disentangling areal and genetic
correspondences. BLS 22. Special Session on Historical Topics in Native American
Languages.
Jacobsen, W. (1980). Washo bipartite verb stems. In K. Klar et.al. (eds.) American Indian
and Indoeuropean Studies. Papers in honor of Madison S. Beeler. Mouton
Lehmann, C. (2004). Interlinear morphemic glossing. Christianlehmann. https:// www.
christianlehmann.eu/publ/lehmann_img.pdf
Rizzi, L. 1994. Early null subjects and root null subjects. In T. Hoekstra & B. D. Schwartz
(eds) Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar, 151–176. John
Benjamins.

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