Afranaph Glossing Conventions – Revised October, 2011

This is a list of the most commonly used glosses in the Afranaph database. Although our glossing practices follow the general guidelines of the Leipzig Glossing Rules [http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php], we have found it useful to and necessary to add some glosses and modify others to find conventionalized morphemes that play an important role in constructions of grammar. The gloss list includes all of the conventionalized gloss words that we use crosslinguistically and what they stand for, with a bit of explication where we think it will help our users (and our data-enterers). Some of the glosses we have added reflect distinctions that are found in the languages we have studied but that are not so obviously found outside of those languages in a fashion that would be glossed the same.

Content words are glossed with the best-guess English translation. All conventional glosses should be drawn from the list below, although departures from standard notation have sometimes been judged appropriate by consultants and/or analysts in order to convey relevant language-specific information. Words are separated by spaces on original text, morpheme breakdown and gloss lines. A single morpheme in the morpheme breakdown is bounded on either side by an empty space (at the beginning or end of a word) or by a dash or dashes if it is word internal, and if an indivisible morpheme expresses a combination of glosses, then the glosses corresponding to the single morpheme are separated by a period, as in the example below.

English:  Bill saw girls

Bill saw        girl-s

Bill see.PST girl-pl

We expect that we will add to this list or reassign some glosses from time to time, as long as no data is lost or misrepresented as a result. We have separated the person, number and gender glosses from the rest so that the contrast with glossing in noun class languages, common in Africa, could be highlighted. Be sure to consult the additional notes at the end of this document.

Person, Number and Gender – See the notes directly below this chart if you speak a noun class language, as all the Bantu languages are.

Gloss Meaning Usage notes

If you speak a noun class language, then do not use glosses for number unless they are noun class neutral singular or plural markers. Instead, just indicate the noun class. Sometimes noun class languages distinguish first and second person for c1 and c2. For example, a subject marker (SM) with class 1 agreement would be rendered SM.c1, and if c1 and/or c2 is distinguished for person, then gloss SM.c1.1^st (I) or SM.c2.1^st (we). We do not mark Bantu languages for 3^rd person, insofar as all forms not marked for 1^st or 2^nd are understood to be 3^rd.

All other glosses

For all of the glosses below marked with an asterisk (*), please consult the additional notes at the end.

Gloss                                   Meaning                               Usage notes

Additional notes and conventions

CAUS: The distinction between CAUS, CAUS1 and CAUS2 is included because there are Bantu phenomena of particular interest in this respect. Searching for CAUS will find all three glosses, but the distinction between CAUS1 and CAUS2 is included because many Bantu languages have two affixes that have been characterized (by some) as causative, although their effects differ in interesting ways (and ways that interact with patterns of anaphora). In languages where both affixes are present, we have classified them according to morphological and (to a lesser degree) semantic effects that distinguish them. For languages that have only one causative affix, CAUS is used exclusively. Just use CAUS if you are not sure how to distinguish them.

INF: For noun class languages, when the infinitival marker is a noun class marker, use the class marker, e.g., the infinitive of the verb ‘say’ would be glossed c15-say in most Bantu languages. Only use INF if there is no noun class marker that expresses this meaning or you are not sure how the morpheme that indicates the infinitive should be otherwise glossed.

NMLZ: Do not use this if your language has noun classes, but instead indicate the noun class (e.g., ‘c15-walk’ for ‘walking’, or perhaps c5-walk, for whatever noun class marker is involved) unless the nominalizing affix is distinct from the noun class system.

OM and SM: These are affixes on the verb that show the person, number, and/or gender of the syntactic object or the syntactic subject of the verb, respectively. We use these forms for both agreement forms and clitic pronouns and leave it as a matter of analysis as to whether the forms in question should be pronominal or not in any given case.

PRN: Use this to indicate pronominal status. All agreement or class marking comes after (e.g. PRN.1^st.sg or PRN.c1.1^st). For pronouns that are formed off a distinct root morpheme, these would be PRN-1^st.sg and PRN-c1, etc. The classes of pronouns determined by use, such as EMPH, WH and LOG should precede PRN, e.g., LOG.PRN.3^rd for a third person logophoric pronoun.

RCM/RFM vs. RECP/REFL: Do not use RECP/REFL for a verbal affix that requires a reciprocal or reflexive interpretation. For verbal affixes use RCM/RFM as appropriate, but if the reciprocal/reflexive is a full phrase or word independent of the verb, and there is no independent meaning for the word or morpheme in any other context, use RECP/REFL, but consult us about the best choice of gloss. It is more typical that the root form for forming a reflexive or a reciprocal direct object nominal, for example, is a root form that has an independent meaning. In such cases, we want you to make up a new gloss in upper case letters that indicates what the word means. For example, in Lubukusu, the form ba-b-eene, which is glossed c2-c2-OWN, since the morpheme eene can have the meaning ‘owner’ when it is not used in a reflexive construction (and the c2 morpheme has two parts). In particular, do not gloss reflexives as ‘self’ unless there is an independent usage in your language where the non-affixal reflexive form really means ‘self’, as in English, where it can mean the essence of a personality (e.g., The psychologist presented a theory of the self). Here are some examples of language-specific glosses we have used for some of the languages in the project (in Amharic, it would appear both morphemes are related to the root that means ‘head’).

RFM/RCM and polysemy: Sometimes a single marker can have more than one potential gloss, e.g. the form that is used for reflexive may be identical to the form that is used for passive, reciprocal, middle, intransitive etc. When there are overlaps of this kind, consult with us. We may advise that the gloss simply be a capitalization of the shape of the form, so that we do not have to make analytic decisions. Our database will permit specifications of other sorts that will permit examples of the form used for different functions to be found in the database.

TAM/TNS/ASP:Tense-aspect marker/Tense. Use this when you do not know how to characterize the tense or aspect, but you want to preserve the place in the morpheme breakdown. See the discussion of PST and FUT.

TNS: Languages that have more than one kind of a specific tense (e.g. two or more future tenses or past tenses), a number goes after the tense gloss (e.g. FUT2 or PST2). Use the higher number for tenses that are more remote from the present, e.g., if the past tense is distinguished between a form that means earlier today vs. a form that means a time before that, they should be glossed as PST1 and PST2, respectively, and this should be extended to PST3 if there are further such distinctions about more remote times.

WH: When it is not clear how to specify the person, number and gender features, e.g., for a word like English which, then gloss as ‘WH.which’, which permits someone searching for Wh-words to find it.