Generalized Glossing Guidelines: An Explicit, Human- and Machine-Readable, Item-and-Process Convention for Morphological Annotation

Abstract

We introduce a YAML notation for multi-line interlinear glossed text (IGT) that represents non-concatentative processes such as infixation, reduplication, mutation, truncation, and tonal overwriting in a consistent, formally rigorous way, on par with affixation, using an Item-and-Process (IP) framework. Our new notation - Generalized Glossing Guidelines (GGG) - is human- and machine-readable and easy to edit with general purpose tools. A GGG representation has four fields: (1) A Surface Representation (sr) with curly brackets to show where non-concatenative morphological processes have applied. (2) A Lexical Representation (lx) that explicitly shows nonconcatenative processes as insertions, deletions, and substitutions as they apply to the basic form of morphemes. (3) A gloss field (gl) that associates glosses with morphemes and morphological processes in the sr and lx lines. (4) A metalanguage translation. We demonstrate the linguistic adequacy of GGG and compare it to two other IGT annotation schemes.