Discontinuous units – words or morphemes – are like bisected units in that one semantic unit is represented by two expression units. However, they present the added difficulty that their parts are not adjacent, so the gloss has to make it explicit what belongs together. For a discontinuous morph (stem or affix), various solutions have been proposed in the literature.¹ An unambiguous solution for a circumfix is to set it off by inverted angled brackets, as in .

Rule 19a below is meant to handle circumfixes. It may be used for discontinuous stems (and words), too. The first choice, however, is to try and gloss each part independently, as done for the German circumposition um … willen ‘for’ in .

The second choice is to treat them by the same formalism as for circumfixes. Consider the case of preverbs. In several Indo-European languages, they may be distantiated from their host verb to yield a discontinuous verb stem. There are two options for glossing such discontinuous compounds: If the compounding is relatively transparent, one may, again, prefer to provide the preverb and the base each with its own gloss. If the compound is completely lexicalized, this might be misleading, and so it may be preferable to treat it as a discontinuous morph in the gloss, as in .

The gloss of the discontinuous item is positioned beneath that member of the pair which functions as its head.

Hoocąk has discontinuous verb stems in which a series of conjugation affixes are inserted (Helmbrecht & Lehmann 2008). There are at least two ways of analyzing such a structure:

1. The verb stem is a unitary morph, the conjugation affixes are infixes. This is implemented in .a.
2. The verb stem is a discontinuous morph, its initial component is a (fossilized) preverb, the conjugation affixes are prefixes to the second stem component. This is implemented in .b.

Observe that what is marked off by the angled brackets in the #a version are the affixes, while in the #b version, it is the stem. The notation marks the affixes in #a as infixes, the affixes in #b as prefixes. Once again, the correct solution is a question of morphological analysis, not of proper glossing.

Morphological glossing meets its limits with intractable languages like German. Here a word form may contain a discontinuous stem one component of which is enclosed by a circumfix. is the past participle of the verb featured in .

In such cases, chevrons instead of angled brackets may be resorted to.

¹ Among them is the proposal (Comrie et al. 2008) to repeat the same gloss under each part of the discontinuous item. However, this seems misleading, as the syntagmatic cooccurrence of synonymous L1 items is not at all rare – e.g. in hypercharacterization – and must be distinguished from discontinuity.