A Morphological Glossing Assistant

One of the tasks language documenters face is that of assigning glosses to function morphemes, including affixes. These glosses are typically used in marking up interlinear text at a morpheme level. But without a morphological parser, marking up interlinear text is tedious and error-prone. Ideally, a parser will be guided not only by the form and syntagmatic properties of morphemes, but also by their morphosyntactic properties (features). We describe a system which simultaneously helps the linguist use standard glosses for function morphemes, and assigns corresponding morphosyntactic features to those morphemes. These features can be used by a morphological (or syntactic) parser. Our system defines a mapping between glosses and features, as well as a way of extending the gloss/ feature system with properties which may have been overlooked. We illustrate the operation of the system from both the user’s point of view and from an internal perspective.