List of glossing abbreviations

• Grammatical abbreviations are generally in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. • For instance, capital or small-cap (frequently abbreviated to ) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning. Similarly, (small) cap might be a locative suffix used in nominal inflections, prototypically indicating direction downward but possibly also used where it is not translatable as 'down' in English, whereas lower-case 'down' would be a direct English translation of a word meaning 'down'. Not all authors follow this convention. • Person-number-gender is often further abbreviated, in which case the elements are in lowercase rather than in small caps. • e.g. 3ms(g), 2fp(l), 1di and 1pe rather than , , and . Such spellingse.g. in • These morphosyntactic abbreviations include A (agent of transitive verb), B (core benefactive), D or I (core dative / indirect object), Su (subject of v.t. or v.i.), and T (theme – direct object of ditransitive verb). • Such abbreviations are, however, commonly used as the basis for glosses for symmetrical voice systems (formerly called 'trigger' agreement, and by some still 'focus' (misleadingly, as it is not grammatical focus), such as (agent voice), (beneficiary 'focus'), (locative 'trigger'). • Glosses for generic concepts like 'particle', 'infix', 'tense', 'object marker' and the like are generally to be avoided in favor of specifying the precise value of the morpheme. However, they may be appropriate for historical linguistics or language comparison, where the value differs between languages or a meaning cannot be reconstructed, or where such usage is unambiguous because there is only a single morpheme (e.g. article or aspect marker) that can be glossed that way. When a more precise gloss would be misleading (for example, an aspectual marker that has multiple uses, or which is not sufficiently understood to gloss properly), but glossing it as its syntactic category would be ambiguous, the author may disambiguate with digits (e.g. and for a pair of aspect markers). Such pseudo-glossing may be difficult for the reader to follow. • Authors also use placeholders for generic elements in schematicized parsing, such as may be used to illustrate morpheme or word order in a language. • Examples include or 'head'; or 'root'; or 'stem'; , or 'prefix'; , or 'suffix'; , or 'clitic' or 'enclitic'; 'preposition' and or 'postposition', 'person–number–gender element' and 'tense–aspect–mood element' (also number–gender, person–number, tense–aspect, tense–aspect–mood–evidential) etc. These are not listed below as they are not glosses for morphological values. == Lists ==

Nonabbreviated English words used as glosses are not included in the list below. Caution is needed with short glosses like , , and , which could potentially be either abbreviations or (as in these cases) nonabbreviated English prepositions used as glosses. Transparent compounds of the glosses below, such as or 'remote past', a compound of 'remote' and 'past', are not listed separately. Abbreviations beginning with (generalized glossing prefix for non-, in-, un-) are not listed separately unless they have alternative forms that are included. For example, is not listed, as it is composable from + . This convention is grounded in the Leipzig Glossing Rules. Some sources are moving from classical lative () terminology to 'directional' (), with concommitant changes in the abbreviations. Other authors contrast -lative and -directive. These are concatenated, e.g. MFZS = MoFaSiSo 'mother's father's sister's son', yBWF = yBrWiFa 'younger brother's wife's father'. 'Elder/older' and 'younger' may affix the entire string, e.g. oFaBrSo (an older cousin – specifically father's brother's son), MBDy (a younger cousin – specifically mother's brother's daughter) or a specific element, e.g. MFeZS 'mother's father's elder sister's son', HMeB 'husband's mother's elder brother'. 'Gen' indicates the generation relative to the ego, with ∅ for the same (zero) generation. E.g. Gen∅Ch (child of someone in the same generation, i.e. of a sibling or cousin); ♂Gen+1F (female one generation up, i.e. mother or aunt, of a male); Gen−2M (male two generations down, i.e. grandson or grandnephew). 'Cross' and 'parallel' indicate a change or lack of change in gender of siblings in the chain of relations. Parallel aunts and uncles are MoSi and FaBr; cross-aunts and uncles are FaSi and MoBr. Cross-cousins (+Cu) and parallel cousins (∥Cu) are children of the same. Parallel niece and nephew are children of a man's brother or woman's sister; cross-niece and nephew are the opposite. 'Elder' and 'younger' occurs before these markers: o∥Cu, y+Cu, and the gender of the ego comes at the very beginning, e.g. ♂o∥CuF, ♀y+CuM. == Literature ==

• Leipzig Glossing Rules • Payne, Thomas E. 1997. Describing Morphosyntax. • Summary of case forms: == Notes ==