Each morpheme of L1 should be recognizable by its gloss. The reader is supported in this task if glosses are consistent within one publication. It will rather confuse him if Yucatec Maya k'iin is once glossed 'sun' and the next time 'day'. Polysemy is resolved in the idiomatic translation. The gloss renders neither the contextual sense nor the full meaning range of an item.

Homonymy

Naturally, this does not apply to homonymy. Homonymous L1 morphs represent different morphemes and therefore receive different glosses, as in .

This is stipulated by Rule 6, which follows from Rule 3b.

Rule 6. L1 homonymy is resolved in the morphological gloss, polysemy is preferably not.

By contrast, in the case of L2 homonymy, an exception to Rule 3b is allowable. Assume two distinct L1 roots such that G1 is the appropriate gloss for one of them and G2 is the appropriate gloss for the other, but G1 and G2 are homonymous in L2. This case can be let go. Here is an example:

• Cabecar oloí is a noun meaning ‘light’ (opposite of darkness)
• Cabecar jabóó is an adjective meaning ‘light’ (not heavy)
• Cabecar wä́ká- is a verb stem meaning ‘light’ (illuminate)

These three Cabecar stems may have the same gloss. The context, the example translation and/or the glossary will resolve the ambiguity.

Polysemy

If the senses of an item are reducible to a generic meaning (Gesamtbedeutung), then this should be used in the gloss (Rule 7a). For instance, the Turkish dative/allative suffix -a is glossed by 'DAT'. The generic meaning rather than the basic meaning should appear in the gloss because it has better chances to fit all the diverse contexts in which the item occurs.

Sometimes, there is either no generic meaning, or if there is, L2 does not have a term for it. In cases like Yucatec k'iin 'sun, day', there are various alternatives. First, the basic meaning may be used as the gloss; thus Yucatec k'iin 'sun'. However, if all the occurrences of a polysemous morpheme in a particular publication reflect the same (derived) reading, then generally no useful purpose is served if it is consistently glossed by its basic meaning. For instance, all the occurrences of Yucatec k'iin in a particular text might mean 'day'. Then this would be the appropriate gloss.

Finally, all conceivable reductions to one sense may seem misleading. Then two or even more senses may be indicated in the gloss, separated by a slash. Here are some suggestive examples:

Although these are plausibly cases of polysemy rather than homonymy, such a polysemy is not expected from the point of view of English as a metalanguage.¹ Nor would it be easy for a reader to construe the sense of an example sentence that contained pa in the sense of ‘body’ glossed only by ‘color’. illustrates Rule 7c.

Not seldom, the same morph has a lexical meaning and a grammaticalized variant (to which no phonological difference corresponds). Examples include Mandarin gěi give/DAT and Mapudungun kine one/INDF. In such cases, solution #c of Rule 7 is recommended, although #d seems admissible.

Syncretism often involves extensive polysemy and/or homonymy. If it were to be made explicit in a morphological gloss, then e.g. the gloss for Lat. ancillae would have to be maid.F:GEN.SG/DAT.SG/NOM.PL. This may be appropriate if the discussion in the context is dedicated to syncretism. Otherwise, only the category actually required by the context may be shown, as in .

In other words, in cases of syncretism solutions #c and #d of Rule 7 must be resorted to.

A language may use a whole paradigm of markers in two clearly distinct functions. For instance, a set of cross-reference markers may combine with a verb to reference its subject, and with a noun to reference its possessor. Here again, the two alternatives mentioned are open: either gloss the verb indexes by SBJ and the noun indexes by POSS, or gloss them by SBJ/POSS in both positions (which is, actually, never done). A third alternative - one that is actually resorted to in Mayan linguistics - is to coin a concept and a term for a paradigm that is used in these two functions and use this in the gloss (like a generic meaning).

¹ This is really a problem of L2. Glosses like ‘hand/arm’ seem necessary for Yucatec k'ab and Cabecar jula and many other languages, simply because English lacks a corresponding hyperonym. The problem would vanish if L1 were Cabecar and L2 were Yucatec.