Interlinear Gloss - Structure

Structure

A semi-standardized set of parsing conventions and grammatical abbreviations is explained in the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

An interlinear text will commonly consist of some or all of the following, usually in this order, from top to bottom:

• The original orthography (typically in italic or bold italic),
• a conventional transliteration into the Latin alphabet,
• a phonetic transcription,
• a morphophonemic transliteration,
• a word-by-word or morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, where morphemes within a word are separated by hyphens or other punctuation,

and finally

• a free translation, which may be placed in a separate paragraph or on the facing page if the structures of the languages are too different to allow it to follow the text line by line.

As an example, the following Taiwanese clause has been transcribed with five lines of text:

1. the standard pe̍h-ōe-jī transliteration,
2. a gloss using tone numbers for the surface tones,
3. a gloss showing the underlying tones in citation form (before undergoing tone sandhi),
4. a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss in English, and
5. an English translation:

1. goa iau-bòe khóat-tèng tãng-sî bóeh tńg-khì. 2. goa1 iau1-boe3 khoat2-teng3 tang7-si5 boeh2 tng2-khi3. 3. goa2 iau2-boe7 khoat4-teng7 tang1-si5 boeh4 tng2-khi3. 4. I not-yet decide when want return. 5. "I have not yet decided when I shall return."

In linguistics, it has become standard to align the words and to gloss each transcribed morpheme separately. That is, khóat-tèng in line 1 above would either require a hyphenated two-word gloss, or be transcribed without a hyphen, for example as khóattèng. Grammatical terms are commonly abbreviated and printed in SMALL CAPITALS to keep them distinct from translations, especially when they are frequent or important for analysis. Varying levels of analysis may be detailed. For example, in a Lezgian text using standard romanization,

Gila	abur-u-n	ferma	hamišaluǧ	güǧüna	amuqʼ-da-č
now	they-OBL-GEN	farm	forever	behind	stay-FUT-NEG
Now their farm will not stay behind forever.

Here every Lezgian morpheme is set off with hyphens and glossed separately. Since many of these are difficult to gloss in English, the roots are translated, but the grammatical suffixes are glossed with three-letter grammatical abbreviations.

The same text may be glossed at a different level of analysis:

Gila	aburun	ferma	hamišaluǧ	güǧüna	amuqʼ-da-č
now	their.OBL	farm	forever	behind	stay-will-not
Now their farm will not stay behind forever.

Here the Lezgian morphemes are translated into English as much as possible; only those which correspond to English are set off with hyphens.

A more colloquial gloss would be:

Gila	aburun	ferma	hamišaluǧ	güǧüna	amuqʼdač
now	their	farm	forever	behind	won't.stay
Now their farm will not stay behind forever.

Here the gloss is word for word; rather than setting off Lezgian morphemes with hyphens, the English words in the gloss are joined with periods when more than one is required to translate a Lezgian word.