Interlinear gloss

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See also: List of glossing abbreviations

In linguistics and pedagogy, an interlinear gloss is a gloss placed between a line of running text (or its transliteration) and its translation, so that each line of the original text acquires multiple lines of transcription known as an interlinear text or interlinear glossed text (IGT), or interlinear for short. Such glosses help the reader follow the relationship between the text and its translation and the structure of the language being glossed. In its simplest form, an interlinear gloss is simply a literal, word-for-word translation that may not be coherent in the language of translation.

An interlinear text will commonly consist of some or all of the following, usually in this order, from top to bottom:

  • The original orthography,
  • a conventional transliteration into the Latin alphabet,
  • a phonetic transcription,
  • a morphophonemic transliteration,
  • a word-by-word or morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, where morphemes within a word are separated by hyphens or other punctuation,

and finally

  • a free translation, which may be placed in a separate paragraph or on the facing page if the structures of the languages are too different to allow it to follow the text line by line.

As an example, the following Taiwanese clause has been transcribed with five lines of text:

  1. the standard pe̍h-ōe-jī tranliteration,
  2. a gloss using tone numbers for the surface tones,
  3. a gloss showing the underlying tones in citation form (before undergoing tone sandhi),
  4. a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss in English, and
  5. an English translation:[1]
1. goa  iau-bòe   khóat-tèng   tãng-sî   bóeh  tńg-khì.
2. goa1 iau1-boe3 khoat2-teng3 tang7-si5 boeh2 tng2-khi3.
3. goa2 iau2-boe7 khoat4-teng7 tang1-si5 boeh4 tng2-khi3.
4. I    not-yet   decide       when      want  return.
5. "I have not yet decided when I shall return."

In linguistics, it has become standard to align the words and to gloss each transcribed morpheme separately. That is, khóat-tèng in line 1 above would either require a hyphenated two-word gloss, or be transcribed without a hyphen, for example as khóattèng. Grammatical terms are commonly abbreviated and printed in SMALL CAPITALS to keep them distinct from translations, especially when they are frequent or important for analysis. Varying levels of analysis may be detailed. For example, in a Lezgian text using standard romanization,[2]

Gila abur-u-n ferma hamišaluǧ güǧüna amuqʼ-da-č
now they-OBL-GEN farm forever behind stay-FUT-NEG
Now their farm will not stay behind forever.

Here every Lezgian morpheme is set off with hyphens and glossed separately. Since many of these are difficult to gloss in English, the roots are translated, but the grammatical suffixes are glossed with three-letter grammatical abbreviations.

The same text may be glossed at a different level of analysis:

Gila aburun ferma hamišaluǧ güǧüna amuqʼ-da-č
now their.OBL farm forever behind stay-will-not
Now their farm will not stay behind forever.

Here the Lezgian morphemes are translated into English as much as possible; only those which correspond to English are set off with hyphens.

A more colloquial gloss would be:

Gila aburun ferma hamišaluǧ güǧüna amuqʼdač
now their farm forever behind won't.stay
Now their farm will not stay behind forever.

Here the gloss is word for word; rather than setting off Lezgian morphemes with hyphens, the English words in the gloss are joined with periods when more than one is required to translate a Lezgian word.

A semi-standardized set of parsing conventions and grammatical abbreviations is explained in the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

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