Interlinear Gloss - Punctuation

Punctuation

In interlinear morphological glosses, various forms of punctuation separate the glosses. Typically, the words are aligned with their glosses; within words, a hyphen is used when a boundary is marked in both the text and its gloss, a period when a boundary appears in only one. That is, there should be the same number of words separated with spaces in the text and its gloss, as well as the same number of hyphenated morphemes within a word and its gloss. This is the basic system, and can be applied universally. For example,

(Turkish) Odadan hızla çıktım.

oda-dan	hız-la	çık-tı-m
room-ABL	speed-COM	go.out-PFV-1sg
room-from	speed-with	go_out-perfective-I

'I left the room quickly'

An underscore may be used instead of a period, as in go_out-PFV, when a single word in the source language happens to correspond to a phrase in the glossing language, though a period would still be used for other situations, such as Greek oikíais house.FEM.PL.DAT 'to the houses'.

However, sometimes finer distinctions may be made. For example, clitics may be separated with a double hyphen (or, for ease of typing, an equal sign) rather than a hyphen:

(French) Je t'aime.

je꞊te꞊aime

I꞊you꞊love

'I love you'

Affixes which case discontinuity (infixes, circumfixes, transfixes, etc.), may be set off by angle brackets (or, for ease of typing, less than and greater than signs), and reduplication with tildes, rather than hyphens:

(Tagalog) sulat, susulat, sumulat, sumusulat (verbal declensions)

sulat	su~sulat	s⟨um⟩ulat	s⟨um⟩u~sulat
write	contemplative mood~write	⟨agent trigger.past⟩write	⟨agent trigger⟩contemplative~write

(See affix for other examples.)

Morphemes which cannot be easily separated out, such as umlaut, may be marked with a backslash rather than a period:

(German) unsern Vätern

unser-n	Väter-n
our-DAT.PL	father\PL-DAT.PL

'to our fathers' (the singular of Väter 'fathers' is Vater)

A few other conventions which are sometimes seen are illustrated in the Leipzig Glossing Rules.