[Lingtyp] Cross-morpheme glosses

[randylapolla]

Hi All,
Kate’s idea is similar to what Shobhana Chelliah did in her Grammar of Meithei (MGL 1997): as the agglutinative morphology was quite complex, she added a 4th line under the gloss line with phrasal glosses. This made it a lot easier to read.

Randy

On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 5:06 AM, Kate Lindsey via Lingtyp <[lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org](mailto:On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 5:06 AM, Kate Lindsey via Lingtyp <<a href=)> wrote:

> I agree with Christian that the choice of interlinear glossing has a lot to do with the audience, context, and what you wish to convey. I enjoy reading interlinear texts that allow the reader to toggle between a simple or a more complex gloss to provide the most accessibility for readers. This is difficult in a static text, however.
>
> As for how to gloss your examples, your pen example reminds me of how authors often add a literal translation or paraphrase in square brackets after the free translation to assist the reader. So I might suggest adding [pen] in brackets after your truer to the morphology gloss instr-repet~write (1). Alternatively, you could do this in the morphology line and have the complex morphology in the square brackets (2). For your thinking example, I might gloss such a prefix with an "unknown" abbreviation like unk or der `unknown derivational affix' (1). I think (2) is closer to what you've suggested, but I think (1) is much better.
> [image.png]\
>
> Kate
>
> ____________________
> Kate L. Lindsey
> Assistant Professor of Linguistics
> Boston University
> Boston, MA 02215
> http://ling.bu.edu/people/lindsey
>
> On Fri, Jul 11, 2025 at 11:04 AM Konstantin Henke via Lingtyp < lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> glossing texts of agglutinative languages frequently leads to the situation where an orthographic word consisting of multiple transparent morphemes can be glossed using an English word, i.e. usually when derivative morphology is present, such as Takbanuaz Bunun ispapatas 'pen', which is derived from the root patas 'to write' as is-pa~patas [INSTR-REPET~write] 'thing to frequently write with'. When glossing longer texts, I'm often unsure whether to indicate the morphology or not, and I usually go by my own transparency judgement; i.e. if the gloss says ' INSTR-REPET~write' and the translation mentions a 'pen', then the reader might be able to put two and two together, but in other cases the derived meaning might have been conventionalized in a way that is no longer transparent from its (original) morphological composition, so writing ispapatas without indicating morpheme boundaries and just glossing it as 'pen' might be the better option.
>>
>> However, the boundary between derivational and inflectional morphology is of course not always clear (like locative or instrumental markers often having a nominalizing function in many Austronesian languages, as in the example above) and is thus not a good diagnostic of whether to provide morphological transparency in the glossing or not. Secondly, sometimes the linguist wishes to both indicate morphology and provide a gloss for the entire cross-morpheme meaning, i.e. both is-pa~patas (instead of ispapatas) and 'pen'.
>>
>> Additionally, sometimes the concrete function of some derivative affix might not be known, but the meaning of the entire derived word is known, while the linguist wishes at the same time to indicate the presence of said affix. E.g. Bunun miliskin 'to think' consists of mi- (unclear) and the root liskin 'believe, think, assume, consider' (De Busser, 2009: 573). In a text, I'd like to indicate both the fact that mi- is a prefix and the fact that miliskin is best translated as 'to think'.
>>
>> I have thought about using the dot that usually has the opposite function (joining multiple meanings/functions/glosses to correspond to one morpheme) in order to join multiple morphemes to correspond to one gloss, i.e. writing mi.liskin with the gloss 'think' or is.pa.patas 'pen'. This does not seem to be common practice and might not actually be very useful since the morphemes themselves aren't glossed, but at least it would point to the fact that affixal morphology present instead of just giving the reader a "chunk" like ispapatas for them to figure it out themselves.
>>
>> I was wondering if someone could point me to the common practice or even recommendations like the Leipzig glossing rules (which do not treat this case) or even to an entirely different approach I might not have thought of.
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>> Konstantin Henke
>>
>> –––
>> De Busser, R. (2009). Towards a grammar of Takivatan Bunun: Selected topics (Doctoral dissertation, L).
>>
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