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187 GLOSSES
There are standard lists of abbreviations for the grammatical categories used in
glossing. Lehmann (1982) is the major work in this area, and he provides an
extensivelist.AnotherlistisprovidedbytheDepartmentof LinguisticsattheMax
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, http:// www.eva.
mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html. But most people use their own abbreviations,
and, in any case, you must provide a list of the abbreviations used. The
major point is to avoid providing the same abbreviation for, say subject and subjunctive
or absolute and ablative, particle and participle, imperative and impersonal,
and so on. The use of the figures 1, 2, 3 is standard for first, second and third
persons, while big roman numerals are used for declension or conjugation classes.
Discontinuous elements provide problems for glossing – problems which are
solved in a number of different ways. Fortunately, these are rare enough not to
cause too many problems, and can sometimes be treated as instances of morphological
cumulation.
Dealing with the morphophonologically complex
Where languages are particularly morphophonologically complex, it may be
necessary to add a fourth line to the gloss. In this situation, the first line will be
the surface form, the second line the underlying morphemic form, the third
line the gloss and the fourth line the translation. A very simple example from
Yimas (see Foley 1991: 51) in (4) makes the point.
(4) ta�a
taj-nak
see-imp
‘look at it’
Note in this case that the second line shows morphemes and not morphs (and
hence my use of the hyphen rather than the decimal point which is used to separate
morphs). However, for many purposes this degree of sophistication will
not be necessary. Lehmann (1982: 211) suggests that where morphemes whose
boundaries are not marked in the foreign language text are nevertheless translated
in the gloss, they should be separated by colons. Using this convention,
(4) could be represented as (5).
(5) ta�ak
see:imp
‘look at it’
Most authorities, however, seem to see this situation as equivalent to that illustrated
with the gloss of va in (1), and simply use the period notation.