[Lingtyp] What do glossing labels stand for?

Wed Jan 27 01:18:30 UTC 2016

Hi Hedvig,

Just to respond to your last point about preferring databases over grammar books: as someone originally trained as a typologist and then writing a fieldwork-based thesis, I agree that that experience changes the way in which you read grammars entirely. I also agree that there can never be enough collaboration between fieldworkers and typologists.

But I don't think we should conflate the rightly increased focus on the accountability of grammar writers, resulting in the professionalisation of archiving practices, with the goals of grammatical description. The maturation of language documentation as a discipline, separate from language description, following Himmelmann's work has been an extremely important development. But linked corpora, as the product of language documentation, are not grammars. I think that a 'traditonal book grammar' as an intermediary between data repositories and typology has value, exactly because it explicitly serves to interpret the labels in our glosses and tries to account for a language as a system. This does introduce a distinction between the interpretation of glosses in desciptive grammars and in typology, as the many interesting contributions to the present discussion aim to address.

Best,
Stef

Stef Spronck

KU Leuven, Linguistics, research unit FunC<http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/ling/func> | KU Leuven profile<http://http//www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/nl/person/00098925> | Personal website<http://people.anu.edu.au/stef.spronck/>

________________________________
Van: Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] namens Hedvig Skirgård [hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com]
Verzonden: woensdag 27 januari 2016 1:31
Aan: Östen Dahl
CC: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Onderwerp: Re: [Lingtyp] What do glossing labels stand for?

Thank you everyone, in particular Nordhoff for that very clear list :D. It's exactly what I was thinking too.

The Leipzig glossing rules do state that they are not absolute rules, but merely summing up already existing conventions. I.e. you can't really "apply the Leipzig glossing rules" without giving any more information, but just use it as a help in formulating your own glossing rules. Right? Or am I misreading it?

I agree with Dahl though, a paragraph on comparative concepts vs lg-spec descriptive (or whatever terms you want to use) would be useful.

Intertwined with this is that lg-spec authors of grammars often envisage certain readers, like typologists and sometimes look for "guidance" in typological literature - an enterprise that is problematic like we've discussed. Furthermore, there's the potential issues with expecting PhD students to write a grammar (sketch) in four years and with a quite restrictive page count.

I've worked in a grammatical survey the last few years on african languages, and interacted a lot with fieldworkers working on those languages (extremely rewarding!!) and discussed their manuscripts with them. (This is something I highly-highly encourage every grammar-reading typologist to do if they aren't already). From my relatively limited experience reading grammars so far (compared to say Dahl or Dryer) there are some things that I've found more helpful as a reader and tried to suggest to the writers. Basically I'd like them to be longer, more repetitive, more examples and explicit in more assumptions. Preferably, for me, I'd like a grammar not to be book really, but rather a database with linked corpora. In connection to that, I'd like for there to be better standards in publishing corpora and getting proper credit for it.

Might I also recommend this issue of LD&C that brings up new methods in grammar writing?
http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/?p=263

/Hedvig

Hedvig Skirgård
PhD Candidate
The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity

ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

School of Culture, History and Language
College of Asia and the Pacific

Rm 4203, H.C. Coombs Building (#9)
The Australian National University

Acton ACT 2601

Australia

Co-char of Public Relations

International Olympiad of Linguistics

www.ioling.org<http://www.ioling.org>

On 27 January 2016 at 09:14, Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se<mailto:oesten at ling.su.se>> wrote:
OK, do I understand this correctly? The labels stand for language-specific categories, but normally we arbitrarily choose labels that are names of comparative concepts, without asserting "any relation between the morpheme being glossed and a comparative concept however defined (beyond the mnemonic usefulness).". But at the same time, according to the document at https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php, the glosses are intended to "give information about the meanings and grammatical properties of individual words and parts of words". Can you do that without asserting any relation between the comparative concept identified by the label and the meaning of the item being glossed? The document says: "In many cases, either a category label or a word from the metalanguage is acceptable". Does this mean that lexical glosses are also only mnemonic?

There is also a pedagogical problem here. There is no mention in the document of the distinction between descriptive categories and comparative concepts. The question is if people who write typological papers as well as those who read them understand the significance of glosses. I think there is a general tendency towards fundamentalism in most of us in the sense that we tend to take things more literally than they were intended to. So I suspect that most people who see the gloss DAT will think that it means that the author really thinks that the form in question is a dative, or at least matches some idea of what datives are like. Or that if the German word "Pferd" is glossed as 'horse', that means that it means 'horse'. In other words, it might be worth having some discussion in the document about these problems.

östen

-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>] För William Croft
Skickat: den 26 januari 2016 17:23
Till: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] What do glossing labels stand for?

Exactly.

Bill

On Jan 26, 2016, at 1:11 AM, Sebastian Nordhoff <sebastian.nordhoff at glottotopia.de<mailto:sebastian.nordhoff at glottotopia.de>> wrote:

> Dear list,
> - a language-specific category is a concept with a label chosen by the
> linguist.
> - the label is in principle arbitrary.
> - for mnemonic reasons, a label evocative of the concept being
> described is normally used.
> - since some labels are rather long, it is convenient to abbreviate them.
> - some abbreviations have several plausible expansions (SUPerlative,
> SUPeressive, SUPine)
> - a standardization of the match abbreviation-long label is therefore
> useful for disambiguation purposes. This is what the Leipzig glossing
> rules do in my opinion
> - the Leipzig glossing rules therefore match abbreviations with common
> concept labels. An author using a Leipzig gloss does, however, not
> assert any relation between the morpheme being glossed and a
> comparative concept however defined (beyond the mnemonic usefulness).
>
> Best wishes
> Sebastian
>
>
> On 01/25/2016 09:27 PM, Östen Dahl wrote:
>> Here is a question that I would like to pose to the members of the ALT list. If we accept the distinction between "descriptive categories" and "comparative concepts", what do the labels we use in glossing example sentences stand for - in particular, the labels defined in the Leipzig glossing rules? I have some thoughts about this myself but would like to hear what others think first.
>> östen
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lingtyp mailing list
>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20160127/f4fcff33/attachment.htm>