Abbreviations in glossing

[Matthew Anstey]

Hi,

Thanks to all who responded about Eurotyp glossing guidelines. It has solved
almost all of my IMT problems. 

However, I still have some questions regarding glossing interjections and
particles. In my corpus (Tiberian Hebrew) I have about 30 such words, most
of which have little or no semantic content. Are they therefore glossed as
if they are morphemes? Some examples, with typical English translations: 
'ak "surely", "certainly" 
'ahah "alas" 
na "please" 
'anna "I beg you" (creates an urgent request) 
gam "even", "also" (focus particle) 
'oy "woe...!" 
bi "excuse me" 
he'ach "aha" 
hinneh "look!", "behold!", "surely" (deictic particle) 
ki "because", "for", "when", "if", "saying", etc (discourse deictic
particle) 
chalil "far from it!" 
`od "yet" 
laken "therefore" (discourse marker) 
ken "thus" (discourse anaphor)

Would it be best to gloss these with these English equivalents above, or is
it better to use abbreviations such as: 
'ak ASS (assertive) 
'ahah MAL (malefactive) ???? 
'anna FRM (formal) ???
na FRM (formal) 
gam INTS (intensifier) 
'oy MAL (malefactive) ???? 
bi FRM (formal) 
he'ach EXCL (exclamative) 
?? hinneh EXCL (exclamative) 
ki PTL (particle) ?? (Eurotyp guidelines say to avoid grammatical category
labels) 
chalil ??? 
`od ADVS (adversative) ???? 
laken ??? 
ken ???


Most of these words have varying degrees of prosodic weakening, either
through prosodic cliticisation or reduction of main stress. And as can be
seen, these particles, interjections, etc do a lot of work in affecting the
illocutionary force of statements or introducing particular sentence types
(like curses, requests to a superior) etc. Finally, few of these words are
(synchronically) related to a cognate with an analogous meaning, so hinneh
is unrelated to the other words for looking and seeing, etc, ruling out the
use of a lexeme such as "see" as an IMT. The idiomatic translations such as
"far from it" "I beg you" and so forth are not based on any component parts
of the particles/interjections, they are only rough English equivalents.

Any guidance on the principles used to gloss these sorts of words would be
appreciated, as this list only covers about 1/3 of the total. They pertain
predominately to discourse and interpersonal domains.

With regards,
Matthew

Matthew Anstey
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid
Residence: 7 East Place, Kambah ACT 2902, Australia
ansteyfamily at optusnet.com.au
+61 (0)2 6296 4044





> -----Original Message-----
> From: Discussion List for ALT
> [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Bill Croft
> Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2003 2:32 AM
> To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: Abbreviations in glossing
> 
> 
> After seeing Matthew Anstey's message, I put the abbreviations listed
> at the beginning of Typology and Universals (2nd edition) on my Web 
> page: http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Info/staff/WAC/. > This is the
> complete set developed in the FDG project by Bernard Comrie, 
> Christian Lehmann, Dietmar Zaefferer and myself; a modified 
> version was adopted by Eurotyp. The file also includes the 
> symbols used for glossing (e.g. dealing with circumfixes and 
> infixes), which was adapted by the FDG group from Christian 
> Lehmann's 1982 Folia Linguistica paper on "Directions for 
> interlinear morpheme translations".
> 
> Bill Croft
>