[Lingtyp] What do glossing labels stand for?

Wed Jan 27 08:13:22 UTC 2016

Östen is right that there is a "general tendency towards fundamentalism" 
in us, and maybe by creating e Glossing Rules, we contributed to that 
attitude. But while rigidity is often a virtue in thinking 
scientifically, it is typically impractical in everday life. And I would 
see glossing as a practical necessity of everyday life, not as a 
scientific statement in itself.

So I agree with David Gil: The answer is BOTH. Interlinear glosses 
should be "faithful to the language-specific categories of the 
language.  But at the same time they have to convey information about 
the language that is intelligible to someone who doesn't speak it."

When these two goals conflict (as they often do, of course), I would 
opportunistically choose the label (or the segmentation) that seems most 
helpful to the reader in the context. Using "Gender12" for a Bantu 
language is not informative as a transparent comparative concept, but 
anything other than the language-specific category would be impractical 
here.

On the other hand, the term "Aorist", which I used in my 1993 Lezgian 
grammar, can be easily replaced by "PST" (for past tense). In Lezgian, 
there is both a Past tense and an Aorist tense, which different meanings 
and functioning in the tense system, so from a language-specific point 
of view, the difference is absolutely crucial. But in a typological 
context, when a Lezgian example is cited for different reasons, it's 
perfectly OK to ignore the difference, I think.

So I think that glossing should be context-dependent: 
Language-particular papers and books are more likely to use labels for 
descriptive categories, while typological works are more likely to use 
labels corresponding to well-known comparative concepts. But in neither 
case would it be practical to be rigid.

One sometimes reads that "glossing presupposes an analysis", which is 
certainly true in some sense, but it is clearly not realistic to hope 
that the complete analysis will fit into a gloss. Grammars are often 
highly complicated, and putting all the grammatical information that a 
form contains into the gloss is often impractical. Thus, readers should 
not expect to get everything from a gloss – if they want to have the 
whole story, they'll have to read the complete grammar (if there is one).

This is not different in lexical glosses: Lexical meanings differ widely 
across languages, and it would not be reasonable to put the complete 
meaning of a word into the gloss. Thus, when referring to a mouse, an 
Indonesian would use the word "tikus", but this is also used for 'rat' 
and in fact to any small rodent. But this does not mean that "tikus" 
should be glossed as "small.rodent". Depending on the context, "mouse", 
"rat" (or even "squirrel") are much more suitable glosses.

Best wishes,
Martin

On 26.01.16 23:14, Östen Dahl 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] För William Croft
> Skickat: den 26 januari 2016 17:23
> Till: 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> 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
>>>
>>>
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-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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&
Leipzig University
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