Indication of member, not class

Some morphemes are deeply entrenched in the semantic or pragmatic system of the language and simply have no translation equivalent in L2. Two common ways out are a) to repeat the significans of the L1 item in the gloss, and b) to indicate the class of the item instead of its meaning. Thus, we find the German modal particle eben glossed either as ‘EBEN’ or as ‘PTCL’. The former is just a bankruptcy declaration of linguistic analysis, and the latter is theoretically inadequate, too. If there is no translation equivalent in natural L2, then the linguist has a specialized metalanguage to describe such functions. For the sake of a morphological gloss that is not devoted to modal particles in particular, a gloss like ‘REAFF’ (reaffirmed) will be fully sufficient and more helpful than either of the aforementioned.

By the same token, the gloss of the perfective aspect morpheme will not be Asp. In the literature, one frequently encounters glosses such as Ptcl (particle), Agr (agreement), Art (article). If L1 possesses only one particle, agreement morpheme (hardly imaginable) or article (this is possible), then these glosses are sufficient. In all other cases, this kind of gloss is inappropriate because it does not identify the morpheme and does not give the information on its meaning or function that a gloss is supposed to give. Moreover, the whole glossing becomes inconsistent, as some glosses name particular morphemes, while others name the class a morpheme belongs to.

Consequently, the morphological gloss is not the place for (abbreviations of) grammatical categories like ART(icle), DET(erminer), AUX(iliary), CLF (classifier) etc. These belong in a different line of linguistic representation (or annotation).

There remain situations in which neither an L2 translation equivalent nor a handy grammatical category label is available for a certain L1 morpheme. In these siutations and pending scientific progress, the class name plus a number may be used to identify the morpheme, e.g. ASP1, ASP2 ... for aspects, PTCL1, PTCL2 for particles, PVB1, PVB2 ... for preverbs etc.¹

Rule 10. A morphological gloss represents an individual morpheme, not an entire class or category of morphemes.

Additional indication of class

A gloss is a proper name of an L1 morpheme. It does not need to give information on the grammatical class of the morpheme in question other than what is implied by the name itself. If a gloss is Acc, one assumes that the morpheme belongs to the grammatical class of case morphemes. It is the task of the grammar to clarify whether or not this inference is correct in a particular case. The gloss will not be Case.Acc or anything of this sort. For the same reason, the gloss of the perfective aspect is simply Pfv and not Pfv.Asp, and so on.

There are two classes of exceptions to this rule:

1. For some grammatical category, its name may be part of each of its members or values.
2. A grammatical category of a stem may be indicated in its gloss if it is relevant for the morphology.

As for case #a, the gloss of nominal classes and classifiers is often (though not necessarily) introduced by Cl, e.g. Cl.7 or Cl.Inan, as in . This exception is conventional and presumably motivated by the fact that a mere number, and even a mere class label, might be insufficient.

As for case #b, lexical stems may belong to grammatical classes. Syntactic classes, in particular word classes, are generally not shown in the morphological gloss. As remarked in #1 above, these belong in a different line of linguistic annotation which categorizes rather than identifies units of grammatical structure. Things may be different for morphological classes of stems, i.e. classes that condition the shape of formatives appearing on the stem itself or on some related clause component. Such a class may then be conceived as a morphological feature of the stem even if it is not coded on the stem itself. Here are two examples (cf. also the section on allomorphy):

The nominal class or gender of a noun is often not coded on the noun itself, but does condition the form of clause components agreeing with it, e.g. an adjective attribute, as in . Here the gloss of the noun stem treats the gender as its feature.

In many languages, the valency class of a verb stem conditions conjugation morphology. In Yucatec Maya, conjugation for the category of status shows extensive allomorphy depending on the stem class of the verb and, in particular, its transitivity. For a transitive stem, the completive status allomorph is -ah. For an intransitive stem of the active subclass, the allomorph is -nah. Some verb roots such as the one shown in .a are basically transitive. Since this is also true of its English counterpart ‘beat’, it would seem normal to gloss hats' simply by ‘beat’. In .a, instead, the valency class of the stem has been specified in its gloss, so the conditioning factor of the allomorphy is recognizable.

In these cases, the morphological class of a lexeme is noted with the same formalism as features of a grammatical morpheme are noted.²

¹ Once the analyst has found out the function of such an element, updating the glosses is a matter of ‘find and replace’, which would not be possible if the glosses were simply ASP, PTCL etc.

² Comrie et al. 2008 enclose the class feature in parentheses, following the rule for zero morphs and morphemes. This is inappropriate if the morphological category in question is always covert, and would be appropriate only if there exists, in the word class in question, the alternative of marking it by an overt morph.