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Title: USING INTERLINEAR GLOSS TEXTS TO IMPROVE LANGUAGE DESCRIPTION
Interlinear-glossed text (IGT) is a method of representing semantic, morphological and phonological information about lexemes along with phrase and clause level translations of connected text. While the Leipzig Glossing Rules (LGR) provide general standards and principles for IGT, we argue here that language-family specific guidelines are necessary to facilitate rapid creation of new interpretable IGT that can be used for language description, typological discovery, and cross-language comparison. Using selected examples of Tibeto-Burman IGTs, we demonstrate how linguists create their own terminology and conventions for representing linguistic phenomena which fall outside the scope of the LGR. To date, there are few, at least within the Sino-Tibetan linguistics community, that have discussed language-family specific IGT conventions, so new annotators lack guidance on IGT creation. This paper examines how typical Tibeto-Burman constructions (e.g., reduplication, verb stem alternation, directionals) are represented in IGT from several South Central Tibeto-Burman languages. We offer some remarks on the purposes of IGT and some principles for new IGT creators.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1953296
PAR ID:
10383818
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Editor(s):
Pappuswamy, Umarani
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Indian linguistics
Volume:
82
Issue:
1-2
ISSN:
0378-0759
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1-25
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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