Although most of our glosses follow some of the standard conventions, such as xx, 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. For example, we use the gloss CAUS for ‘causative’ affixes, but in Bantu there are (arguably) two, CAUS1 and CAUS2, and we have tried to distinguish one from the other wherever possible (because they play different roles in anaphoric readings and the placement of anaphoric markers on the verb), even though the distinction is subtle and in part, historically based.

There are also glosses that are used for anaphoric markers, but uniquely for a particular language, such that the root of the morpheme is simply capitalized (e.g., 3ps-ENE). Since one of the questions we are interested in investigating concerns what the exact properties of anaphoric markers are, the nature of the stem morpheme(s) used in the anaphoric marker is an important fact about it we do not want erased, e.g., by calling all reflexives ‘SELF’, even if they have a form that means ‘head’ or ‘own’ or ‘same’ independently. Sometimes, however, a morpheme used in an anaphoric marker is not independently identifiable, but does not achieve an anaphoric reading without being in construction with something else. These are the cases for which we simply capitalize the conventionalized morpheme stem. Cases of this kind are not included in the gloss list, but their properties are always delineated by the properties ascribed to the anaphoric markers they participate in. See also the Anaphora Sketch for the language in question, if there is one.

All upper case glosses are on the list of conventionalized glosses below, and all translation words are in lower case (and absent from this list), but there are also some conventionalized gloss words that are in lower case, such as noun class markers, and those are also on the list below.

Glossing Conventions 1.1

This is a list of the most commonly used glosses in the Afranaph database. The glosses follow the general guidelines of the Leipzig Glossing Rules [http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php]

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

* 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.