Chapter 174Abbreviations and Glossing-Symbol Conventions

174.1 Morpheme boundary symbols and the interlinear format

The grammar's interlinear examples follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules (Comrie, Haspelmath & Bickel 2015), adapted for the morphological structure of Ainu. A minimal example has three aligned lines: a morphemic segmentation line (m), a gloss line (g), and a free translation (tr). An optional surface-form line (ain) appears where the orthographic surface differs from the segmentation; an original-script line (orig) preserves katakana source text where the segmentation is editorial. The methodology governing source attribution, example selection, and the layout of example headers is set out in Chapter 10 (Interlinear Glossing, Abbreviations, and Citation Conventions).

Three symbols mark morpheme structure within a word: Comrie, Haspelmath & Bickel (2015)

The personal indexes (ku=, e=, eci=, a=, =an, =as, and the object prefixes) are uniformly marked with = throughout the grammar. This follows the orthographic convention begun by Nakagawa (from his 1980s data-management practice, promulgated in the 1986 語りの中の生活誌 and now dominant in Hokkaidō teaching and descriptive materials): the = keeps inflectional person marking visually distinct from derivation and makes the dictionary headword recoverable. It is expressly not the Leipzig-glossing clitic boundary — Nakagawa himself notes his usage is unrelated to that convention Nakagawa (2024: 58–60). Other sources notate the same elements differently: Satō and Ijäs write them with hyphens, Hattori and Tamura solid, Kirikae with a space; examples quoted from those sources are renotated to = here. The markers' actual morphological status — clitic-like for =an, affix-like for the prefixal set — is mixed and contested, and is treated in Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms) and Chapter 69 (The Personal-Affix Template: Position Classes and Affix Ordering). Derivational material — applicative prefixes, the causative suffix -ke, the reflexive and reciprocal prefixes, and the plural stem suffix -pa — is separated with -.

The portmanteau dot . joins fused atoms within a single gloss position without inserting a morpheme boundary on the morphemic line. Two uses arise: (1) person-and-role portmanteaux (1sg.a for a single morpheme encoding both first-person singular and agent), and (2) a lexical-root gloss combined with a grammatical atom (track.poss for ru-we 'the trace of —'). Every atom in a dot-joined sequence must exist in the inventory below.

174.2 Gloss abbreviation inventory

All grammatical-category labels in gloss lines are drawn from the table below. The grammar's <Ex> component validates every uppercase token at build time and throws if an atom is absent. Lexical glosses — the ordinary English words that translate roots and stems — are lowercase and do not require registration. The inventory follows the Leipzig Glossing Rules base set (Comrie, Haspelmath & Bickel 2015) extended with categories specific to the description of Hokkaido Ainu.

174.3 Dialect and locality labels

Every interlinear example carries a dialect tag indicating which variety of Ainu it represents. The closed set of recognized tags is listed below; the tag appears in the example header as the dial attribute. Finer locality — the specific community, speaker, or recording site — is recorded in the place field rather than as a new dialect tag. The dialect survey and the principles governing example selection are set out in Chapter 9 (The Dialect Sample and the Corpus-Quantification Method).

The tag HK is used where a source covers more than one Hokkaido locality or where the specific site cannot be determined. Sakhalin (SA) and Kuril (KU) examples appear only to illuminate contrasts with the Hokkaido system and are always tagged as such. No ad-hoc locality tags are introduced; the place field carries any further detail.

174.4 Notation conventions

Several conventional marks appear outside the three-line gloss proper:

The Latin-script phonemic transcription — the grammar's primary writing system for Ainu forms — is described in Chapter 11 (The Latin Phonemic Transcription). Orthographic variation, word-division conventions, and the relationship between different romanization standards in the literature are covered in Chapter 15 (Orthographic Standardization and the Word-Division Problem). Technical grammatical terms used throughout the grammar are defined in Chapter 173 (Glossary of Grammatical Terms).

174.5 Cross-source glossing concordance

The descriptive literature on Hokkaido Ainu uses divergent glossing conventions. English-medium typological treatments and Japanese-medium reference grammars do not share a unified standard, and examples drawn from these sources and re-glossed here may carry different labels than the originals. The table below maps the most consequential divergences.

The evidential labels warrant the most attention for readers moving between this grammar and Dal Corso (2018). Dal Corso employs a fine-grained eight-term system organized by two parameters — source reliability and event accessibility — yielding dir.rsn (direct/reasoning), dir.knw (direct/knowledge), ind.vis (indirect/visual), ind.rep (indirect/reportative), ind.sens (indirect/sensory), and their extensions Dal Corso (2018: 304–309). This grammar uses four simplified labels (INFR, REP, PERS, EVID) that correspond to the grammatical construction rather than to Dal Corso's semantic parameters; the mapping is discussed alongside the construction in Chapter 120 (The Nominalization-plus-Copula Evidential Schema).

Refsing (1986) predates the Leipzig Glossing Rules Refsing (1986) and uses a non-standardized labeling system with lowercase labels; readers consulting her Shizunai paradigm tables should use this grammar's abbreviation inventory as the mapping reference. The Japanese-medium grammars of Satō (2008) and Nakagawa (2024) work predominantly with Japanese metalanguage rather than Latin-script gloss abbreviations Satō (2008); Nakagawa (2024); where they do supply English-style labels in comparative sections, these are generally compatible with the inventory here.

The AFF (affiliative) versus POSS (possessive) difference reflects a genuine terminological divergence between traditions. Bugaeva aligns with the Japanese 所属形 (shozokuei) label — translating it as "affiliative" — while this grammar uses POSS to emphasize the morphological category (the "belonging form" that the noun takes when possessed or when it heads a nominalized constituent). The concept form versus affiliative-form opposition, and the morphological evidence bearing on the choice, are defined in Chapter 44 (Concept Form vs. Affiliative (Possessed) Form).