Glossing conventions

[Sarah Truesdale]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to know if there are particular glossing conventions that are used in FLEx (or ELAN). What I am wondering about about at the moment is how different should the word gloss and the lexical gloss be? For example, should they both say "3.dual" or should one read "3.dual" and the other "they.two"?

Thanks.

Sarah

[Nathan Straub 曹內森]

Hi Sarah,

I assume it's up to the individual, but there are certain glossing conventions in linguistics in general. See the attached documents. In the attached spreadsheet I have compiled lists of glosses from many different sources that you can compare.

As to the "word gloss" vs. "lexical gloss", what I've been taught is that the word field is an unnecessary middle step. It might be useful for preliminary glossing, especially since it is tied to the text charting part of FLEx. However, it's a lot of extra work to do word glossing and then go back and do the exact same thing all over again with lexical glossing. The lexical glosses go into the lexicon, and from there you can do better concordance searches. Better to just hide the word gloss field and work only at the morpheme and lexical gloss tiers. Then, if you later want the word glosses for doing text charting, I'm sure there's a way to bulk copy them over from the lexical gloss field.

Nathan

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[Jonathan Dailey]

I will respectfully disagree with Nathan.  In Flex you can use any convention you like of course, but there is no computational reason to use the dots between notions of a gloss.  The lexeme form and its gloss are the building blocks of the word forms that occur in the sentence.  The word gloss is distinct in many languages from that of the morphemes that compose it.  This varies so much that I am sure bulk edit is useful for some languages.

Jonathan

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[Beth Bryson]

Nathan-

A word of advice:  There is *NOT* a good way to fill in the Word Glosses from the Lex. Glosses after the fact.  So if you think you want to do text glossing in the future, I recommend leaving that line showing.  You can just ignore it--if you fill in the Lex Gloss line, the Word Gloss line will get automatically populated, but only if it is showing.  It may not be exactly what you want, but it will be something.  But the way things are right now, it will be very hard to do text glossing later if the Word Glosses have nothing in them, unless you (or whoever is doing the charting) is so familiar with the language that glosses are not needed at all.

Regarding the conventions that Sarah asked about, yes, it completely depends on your goal and who you are doing the glossing for.  If it is for a consultant, they will have recommendations.  If it is for a publication, look at the conventions there.

In some situations, people do exactly what you gave an example of:  They use grammatical glosses for the individual morphemes (like 3.dual) and real words for the word glosses (like "they.two")  Others want a concatenation of the morpheme glosses.

Regarding using periods or spaces, again it depends on your output.  In the Leipzig format, the convention is to put hyphens and no spaces between each morpheme gloss.  In that case, it probably doesn't matter.  (In this case, it is only at the word level that glosses are lined up across the rows.  You don't get the morpheme gloss directly under each morpheme.)   FLEx allows some output options where the "bundling" is by morpheme rather than by word.  In this format, it is whitespace that tells you where the morpheme breaks are in the morpheme gloss line.  In that case, it would be better not to include whitespace in your glosses, to avoid confusion.

In summary, there are pros and cons to each of the options mentioned, and it all depends on your audience and your goal.

-Beth

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<abbreviations.xlsx><Lehmann 2004_Interlinear morphemic glossing.pdf><Leipzig Glossing Rules 08.02.05.pdf><Haspelmath 2014_Generic Style Rules for Linguistics.pdf>

[Beth Bryson]

P.S.  We *are* hoping to change this someday.  We hope to show Lex. Gloss information during Text Charting.  However, for the last two years we have had significantly fewer FLEx developers than we used to have (we've had somewhere around three, off and on).  And there are other projects already in queue that we are trying to finish up.  Adjusting the Text Charting area in a number of ways is a project that is somewhere in the queue to be worked on, but I don't know when it will get worked on relative to other things that are also in the queue.

[Sarah Truesdale]

Thanks everyone. We are following the Leipzig glossing rules already.

We are using the word gloss because this is what my researcher wants me to do, but I also think it can be quite helpful. To me it makes sense to have a grammatical gloss for the lex. gloss and something closer to a free translation in the word gloss. However, both of us (my academic researcher and I, the research assistant) are not too familiar with FLEx so we are (re)learning the ropes.

I'm not concerned about whether there are dots or hyphens as I am following what has been done before me to ensure consistency (so the dots will stay).

Thanks again.

Sarah