Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses
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About the rules
The Leipzig Glossing Rules have been developed jointly by the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Bernard Comrie, Martin Haspelmath) and by the Department of Linguistics of the University of Leipzig (Balthasar Bickel). They consist of ten rules for the "syntax" and "semantics" of interlinear glosses, and an appendix with a proposed "lexicon" of abbreviated category labels. The rules cover a large part of linguists' needs in glossing texts, but most authors will feel the need to add (or modify) certain conventions (especially category labels). Still, it will be useful to have a standard set of conventions that linguists can refer to, and the Leipzig Rules are proposed as such to the community of linguists. The Rules are intended to reflect common usage, and only very few (mostly optional) innovations are proposed.
