Chapter 174Abbreviations and Glossing Conventions

174.1 The tiers of an example

An interlinear example presents a segmented Ainu expression, an aligned grammatical gloss, and a translation. Some examples also show the source spelling or the pronounced form. The gloss analyzes the expression; the translation gives its meaning in context. Both can be editorial additions to a published source Comrie, Haspelmath & Bickel (2015: 1–2).

A source citation identifies the publication and, where supplied, its page or example number. A provenance note can name the earlier edition quoted through that source. An example labelled constructed is an illustration rather than a documented utterance. Published grammatical illustrations, elicited judgments, and recorded speech also differ in provenance; the accompanying notes identify those differences where known. See Chapter 10 (Interlinear Glossing, Abbreviations, and Citation Conventions).

174.2 Boundaries and symbols

The boundary and gloss conventions follow the Leipzig framework with the stated local convention for person marking Comrie, Haspelmath & Bickel (2015: 2–6). The source tier can retain another notation, such as hyphens where the segmented tier uses equals signs. Spaces in that tier need not decide the grammatical word analysis.

174.3 Comparing source labels

Gloss labels belong to particular analyses. Bugaeva's 2012 abbreviation IND corresponds to forms labelled fourth person here; her possessive examples use POSS Bugaeva (2012: 478–479, 499). A multi-author volume need not use one uniform convention across all chapters.

Dal Corso distinguishes subject and object number with labels including SS, PS, SO, and PO, and uses 4S in examples. His evidential labels also express a particular analysis of information sources Dal Corso (2018: 16–17, 304–309). A gloss label can therefore be normalized only after identifying what it means in that source. For competing evidential analyses, see Chapter 120 (Formal Nouns and Evidential Constructions).

174.4 Gloss abbreviations

174.5 Dialect labels and locality

A dialect tag locates the cited material at the level its source supports. A broader regional label does not identify a particular consultant. When no tag is given, the example's dialect is unspecified; it is not automatically Hokkaido. Additional locality, speaker, and recording information can appear in the source note.

Some example words link to an external dictionary. Those links help with lookup; the citation and annotation establish which meaning and grammatical analysis apply in the passage.