[Lingtyp] Resources on glossing choices

Fri Jan 24 15:13:42 UTC 2020

Hi Kate,

Christian Lehmann has a in-depth and detailed discussion of glossing, with suggested guidelines, in Morphologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung (the chapter is in English). He discusses of a number of tricky edge cases which may be helpful. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his prescriptions, but there’s a lot of helpful considerations in the chapter.

To me, the purpose of an interlinear gloss is to help the reader understand the functions of the relevant morphemes in context. A reader should be able to look at a glossed utterance and, given the list of abbreviations and their meanings, understand what’s happening in that utterance. Glossing morphemes according to their historical meaning, or attempting to provide a single unified gloss that covers all the range of meanings of a form, obfuscates the meaning of the utterance, and requires the reader to consult relevant sections of the grammar to disambiguate. Since the meanings of words and morphemes consist of networks of family resemblances (Taylor 2003), it’s often impossible or impractical to find a single gloss that works for all the functions of a morpheme anyway. And forms that are historically related often undergo divergence, so that they become clearly distinct morphemes despite superficial resemblances.

My advice, then, is to gloss each morpheme according to its sense in context, using a gloss that indicates its cell in the morphological paradigm. The Ende ‑eya suffix would therefore have (depending on your analysis) 3 different glosses in your grammar: 1duS.PST, 2duS.PST, and 1duS.FUT. Alternatively, if you think that the 1/2 person functions in the remote past should be analyzed as a single morpheme indicating a discourse participant (1st or 2nd person, contrasting with a non-discourse participant, i.e. 3rd person), you could gloss this form something like LOCUT.duS.PST (where LOCUT = locutor), and you would still gloss the 1duS.FUT function separately. But this is an analytical decision that depends on whether you feel that semantic category is motivated by the available evidence, and not a technical decision about glossing conventions. You could still gloss this form according to context regardless of your analysis. As Baerman & Brown (2013) discuss in WALS Online, “A central question concerning syncretism is whether or not syncretic forms are indicative of some underlying semantic or morphological relationship.” Morphological syncretisms are open to multiple analyses, and different analyses will be appropriate for different sets of data. Your decision to treat ‑eya as either having a single locutor function in the past or two distinct person functions in the past depends on what other evidence there is in the language for a locutor category. If nothing else in the grammar is sensitive to this particular syncretism, you may just want to treat ‑eya as two distinct, homophonous, but historically-related forms, and discuss the nature of that historical relationship in the relevant section of your grammar.

For an excellent example of a grammar which is explicit about the decision to gloss morphemes according to context, see Payne & Payne’s (2013) A typological grammar of Panare. As I note in my review of the book in IJAL (Hieber 2016), this decision does not detract from the authors’ ability to write a typologically-informed grammar that is easily comparable to other grammars (to address Daniel Ross’ concern about the comparability of glosses for the purpose of typology).

Another suggestion I’d make is to include both a list of abbreviations and a list of morphemes in your grammar. In the morphemes list, you’d include the possible functions of each morpheme, and the place(s) in your grammar where the reader can find more information about that form. I’ve seen morpheme lists like this in more grammars recently (including Payne & Payne’s), and I find them very helpful. This would also allow researchers who are interested in the multifunctionality of morphemes (as Daniel Ross discusses) to quickly see the range of functions for a given form.

Regarding the “dummy” morph: I decided to gloss a similar, semantically vacuous person marking suffix in Chitimacha as PLEO, for pleonastic (analogous to the expletive it in meteorological verbs in English, e.g. it is raining) in my 2019 paper in IJAL (Hieber 2019). People seem to find this presentation of the morpheme very clear, and helpful in understanding its function.

I hope some of this is helpful! I look forward to seeing how you decide to tackle this!

very best,

Danny

References

  *   Baerman, Matthew & Dunstan Brown. 2013. Syncretism in verbal person/number marking. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at: https://wals.info/chapter/29.

  *   Hieber, Daniel W. 2016. Review of A typological grammar of Panare: A Cariban language of Venezuela, by Thomas E. Payne & Doris L. Payne. International Journal of American Linguistics 82(3): 387–389. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1086/687388.

  *   Hieber, Daniel W. 2019. Semantic alignment in Chitimacha. International Journal of American Linguistics 85(3): 313–363. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/703239.

  *   Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Interlinear morphemic glossing. In Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan & Stavros Skopeteas (eds.), Morphologie: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung / Morphology: An international handbook on inflection and word-formation (Handbücher Zur Sprach- Und Kommunikations- Wissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics & Communication Science 17.2), pp. 1834–1856. Walter de Gruyter.

  *   Payne, Thomas E. & Doris L. Payne. 2013. A typological grammar of Panare: A Cariban language of Venezuela (Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas 5) Brill.

  *   Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory. 3rd edn. Clarendon Press.

Daniel W. Hieber
Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
danielhieber.com<https://danielhieber.com>

From: Lindsey, Kate<mailto:klindsey at bu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2019 9:22 AM
Subject: [Lingtyp] Resources on glossing choices

Hi all,

I’m looking for resources and/or discussion on analytical choices in how much information to gloss, especially with regards to consistency in a reference grammar. (I searched the archive and didn’t see anything recently about this.)

I’m working with a language that has quite complex verbal morphology, where information is distributed and cumulative across multiple morphemes. Each morpheme has many possible meanings, that can only be determined based on the other morphemes in the word. Any given morpheme may also have meanings across many different domains (agreement, TAM, etc.). There seem to be several approaches: gloss all possible meanings for that morpheme (no matter the form), gloss only the possible meanings for that morpheme (in the given form), or gloss only the intended meanings (given the entire context). This is without even getting into historical meanings of the morpheme! These choices result in either an avalanche or dearth of potentially useful information. However, my main concern is consistency and a principled way of restricting my glosses to a practical and informative amount of meanings.

Thank you for your advice,
Kate

For those interested in a concrete example in Ende – see below.

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Some examples of my glossing issues are in Table 1. The glosses of some morphemes are straightforward, i.e. go- = remote past, -g- = perfective auxiliary, -n = durative. However…

  1.  Should the subject suffix –eya be glossed one way in the remote past form (1|2duS) and another way in the future tense form (1duS)? Or should a combination of the meanings be presented for both? In transitive forms, -eya indexes 1|2nsgA in the remote past and 1nsgA in the future. Again, should the meanings be combined for consistency across valencies/tenses or should a different gloss be used within each form?
  2.  Should a- in the future tense be glossed as recent past (to maintain consistency with the recent past forms) or future.2, as the recent past allomorph is selected only for 2nd person subjects (or 2nd person objects in transitive forms), but in so doing losing its connection to the recent past within the gloss?
  3.  When the remote past/future subject suffix –eya is preceded by the durative suffix –n, the recent past allomorph is used instead.
  4.  In some transitive verbs, the agent agreement is marked in the prefix (where objects are typically marked) not the suffix, and the subject suffix is a dummy morpheme, fixed as –eyo not agreeing with 3nsgA but just standing in in the paradigm. In these cases, should the morpheme in these cases be glossed as 3nsgA (even though it is a dummy morph) or glossed as dummy in some way?
  5.  Just in general, should the subject suffixes include tense in their glossing? Sometimes (e.g., a-g-eyo), the subject suffix is necessary for determining the tense of the form.

Table 1 – -g- ‘perfective auxiliary’

Remote past
Recent past
Future
1duS
go-g-eya
a-g-alla
bo-g-eya
2duS
go-g-eya
a-g-alla
a-g-eyo
3duS
go-g-eyo
a-g-allo
bo-g-eyo
1duS.dur
go-g-n-alla
a-g-n-alla
bo-g-n-alla
2duS.dur
go-g-n-alla
a-g-n-alla
a-g-n-eyo
3duS.dur
go-g-n-eyo
a-g-n-allo
bo-g-n-eyo

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