Jonathan Amith


2023

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Generalized Glossing Guidelines: An Explicit, Human- and Machine-Readable, Item-and-Process Convention for Morphological Annotation
David R. Mortensen | Ela Gulsen | Taiqi He | Nathaniel Robinson | Jonathan Amith | Lindia Tjuatja | Lori Levin
Proceedings of the 20th SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Interlinear glossing provides a vital type of morphosyntactic annotation, both for linguists and language revitalists, and numerous conventions exist for representing it formally and computationally. Some of these formats are human readable; others are machine readable. Some are easy to edit with general-purpose tools. Few represent non-concatentative processes like infixation, reduplication, mutation, truncation, and tonal overwriting in a consistent and formally rigorous way (on par with affixation). We propose an annotation convention—Generalized Glossing Guidelines (GGG) that combines all of these positive properties using an Item-and-Process (IP) framework. We describe the format, demonstrate its linguistic adequacy, and compare it with two other interlinear glossed text annotation schemes.