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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 188
Some questions about glosses
The present tense is not marked in the language I am glossing: what do I
do?
It is frequently the case that there is no morpheme for an unmarked category
and yet you want to show this in your gloss. In some cases you can use zeros
here, but this may seem artificial if there is no particular reason to suppose that
the tense marker would otherwise hold a particular position: zeros are much
easier when they are in complementary distribution with overt morphs. There
are at least two possible answers here: the first is to leave it to the translation to
show that present tense is implied by the lack of marking; the second is to put
the category name in parentheses: ‘(pres)’.
How do I deal with proper names?
Where proper names are not inflected, you can leave them unglossed, simply
gloss them with an initial, or gloss them as ‘[name]’. Where they are inflected,
you will probably need to put a name in the gloss as well, so that there is something
to which to add the inflectional categories. Some writers translate names
where there is a ready equivalent, e.g. French Jean, English John, or Italian
Napoli, English Naples.
How do I punctuate glosses?
You do not punctuate glosses. You punctuate the first line of your set according
to the conventions of the foreign language being dealt with, and the last line
according to the conventions of the glossing language. In addition you mark
divisions into morphs or morphemes. The middle line is complicated enough
without extra punctuation marks.
Do I have to gloss every language?
Conventions are changing on what languages are glossed. While it used to be
thought reasonable to expect a reader to be able to cope with at least French,
German and Latin (and in the nineteenth century, Greek was virtually never
translated, let alone glossed), this is no longer so obviously the case (after all,
people who grew up in India or China or Japan would not necessarily have
learnt any of these languages, even if they speak several languages). Certainly,
if you are making a point about the structures of the languages, you should
gloss everything. You cannot, of course, gloss the language you are writing
in.