Laurie Bauer - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

30
Glosses
Glosses are the interlinear translations of foreign-language data that allow
you to see the structure of the language being dealt with. In providing a gloss,
the writer has to present enough information for the reader to be able to
understand the structure sufficiently to be able to follow the general argument.
This means that sometimes you need to be specific about the internal
structure of a foreign word, and sometimes you do not. For example, suppose
you were glossing the French sentence Il va à l’église le dimanche ‘He goes to
church on Sundays.’ If you are only worried about the use of the definite
article in French for church and for Sunday, you will probably gloss va as
‘goes’. If you are concerned with the details of the present tense in French,
you will probably gloss it to show that it is the third person singular of the
present tense of the verb meaning ‘go’. Because there is variation of this kind
depending on the aims of the writers, it is not possible to give absolute guidelines
about glossing. Some generalities, though, hold true. It should also be
noted that there is more than one way of writing glosses: be prepared to meet
alternatives!
A three-line gloss
If you have to gloss foreign-language data, you should expect to give a threeline
example. The first line presents the foreign-language data. Where appropriate
(see above) the data will have marks showing the boundaries between
morphs/morphemes. The second line provides the gloss, a translation of each
of the elements marked out in the first line. The beginning of each word is
aligned with the word from line one which it translates. The third line (which
may be omitted if it would not be significantly different from the second) is an