The gloss of a morpheme is some sort of name for it, a name that alludes to its meaning or function and is insofar mnemonic or, at least, more helpful to the non-specialist than the L1 morph itself. It must therefore have a certain recognition value. Rule 3b therefore requires that given a particular L1 morpheme, its gloss will be the same in all contexts; and no two morphemes of L1 will have the same gloss.
Rule 3. With the exception specified by Rule 22, there is a biunique mapping of individual L1 morphs onto glosses.
Specifically:
- There is a symbol or a configuration of symbols in the morphological gloss if there is a morph in the L1 text corresponding to it.
- Every L1 morpheme (in all of its variants) has one distinctive gloss identifying it.
This rule requires supplements for certain problematic cases:
The glosses of full synonyms may be distinguished by numbers. E.g. German bevor ‘before1’ and ehe ‘before2’.