Default morphological boundary

The default morphological boundary symbol in T is a hyphen. This is repeated in the gloss; and the converse applies, too.

Rule 16. By default, a morpheme boundary is shown by a hyphen (-) both in T and in the gloss.

If types of morphological processes are distinguished by boundary symbols, the hyphen remains for the peripheral affix boundary.

Compounding

Special symbols may be introduced to distinguish kinds of morpheme boundaries. For instance, the use of the plus sign to signal a boundary in compounding, as in German Weihnachts+gans (Christmas+goose), is rather widespread.

Rule 17. A boundary in a compound stem may be shown by a plus sign (+) both in T and in the gloss.

Boundary not shown in the L1 text

It may happen that T contains a combination of two morphs, but no boundary is shown between them. Various motivations for this are conceivable:

• two morphemes are merged in a portmanteau morph
• the position of the boundary is not clear or irrelevant or cannot be located in the orthography
• the analyst does not want to disfigure L1 orthography with boundary symbols.

In such cases, a colon in the gloss is a hint at a configuration of two morphs whose boundary is not shown in T. The purpose of Rule 23 is to allow the analyst to forgo a segmentation while still observing Rule 3 and insuring biuniqueness of the other boundary symbols. Several examples may be seen in . The colon is also used to render a portmanteau morph, e.g. French au DAT:DEF.M.SG.

Rule 23. A morphological boundary not shown in T is indicated by a colon (:) in the gloss. This applies to portmanteau morphs, too.

In view of widespread sloppy practice, it may be noted that the dot (.) cannot be used instead of the colon for the purpose indicated. The dot is reserved to combine labels of features of one morph.