Glosses in linguistics

users
#1

Linguists frequently need to write glosses. Here are a couple examples
using Spanish as the source language and English as the language that
the author is writing in:

Todos iremos a la playa.
All.m.pl go.1.pl.fut to the.art.sg.fem beach
'We will all go to the beach.'

Juan no sabía qué hacer.
John neg. know.1.sg.imperf what do.inf
'John didn't know what to do.'

(Note that there are rules for how the gloss abbreviations are supposed
to be abbreviated and used, and for the sake of simplicity in the above
examples I did not always follow them rigorously.)

Glosses are typically three lines, as in the above examples. Each
component of the first two lines must be lined up. Here in e-mail I
tried to do this with the space bar, but the results may not appear
perfectly as I intended for all people on this list. They don't even
appear lined up for me because I use a proportional font in my mail
client.

The only way I know to get this right is to use tabs, but the tab
spacings have to be changed for each gloss. If you have a lot of
glosses in your paper tabs will quickly become a serious pain.

I searched the Help, but came up empty-handed. Any suggestions?

#2

would it be possible to use tables? borderless. allow enough columns for a typical gloss? the last row would 'merge' the columns.

I assume glosses are not long sentences with subclauses - how complex can they become? would be unwieldly if glossing James Joyce....

in my email clients I couldn't quite see the separations as such.

f.

#3

On Fri, 8 Jun 2018 15:59:48 -0400 (EDT)
Felmon Davis <davisf@union.edu> dijo:

Linguists frequently need to write glosses. Here are a couple
examples using Spanish as the source language and English as the
language that the author is writing in:

Todos iremos a la playa.
All.m.pl go.1.pl.fut to the.art.sg.fem beach
'We will all go to the beach.'

Juan no sabía qué hacer.
John neg. know.1.sg.imperf what do.inf
'John didn't know what to do.'

(Note that there are rules for how the gloss abbreviations are
supposed to be abbreviated and used, and for the sake of simplicity
in the above examples I did not always follow them rigorously.)

Glosses are typically three lines, as in the above examples.

If the utterance in the source language and its gloss are too long for
one line in the paper you are writing you can just make the utterance
two glosses, that would look just like my two examples above.

The only way I know to get this right is to use tabs, but the tab
spacings have to be changed for each gloss. If you have a lot of
glosses in your paper tabs will quickly become a serious pain.

would it be possible to use tables? borderless. allow enough columns
for a typical gloss? the last row would 'merge' the columns.

I thought of tables (which I otherwise use a lot), but tables would be
more work than constantly changing tab settings.

Part of the problem with tab settings is knowing exactly where the tab
needs to be. I remember a very long time ago in WordPerfect? that the
exact position of the cursor on the line was displayed in the status
bar, or by hovering over it with the mouse. (Or maybe that was in
InDesign or Scribus.) If I could get this information, maybe it could be
used in a script that would place a tab stop at that position.

#4

it occurs to me I may not fully understand your goal. please clarify:

(1) you want the relevant elements of text and gloss in the first two lines to be spaced to spaced so that they line up in the same 'column' and you want the columns to have the same spacing?

(2) the 3rd line would span the whole field (all the 'columns').

but if you use tabs, lines 1 and 2 do not line up.

do I grasp the problem?

f.

#5

as far as I can see spaces would work fine in a monospaced font, why
not use one every time you need to insert a gloss?

d

#6

On Fri, 8 Jun 2018 17:38:08 -0400 (EDT)
Felmon Davis <davisf@union.edu> dijo:

Todos iremos a la playa.
All.m.pl go.1.pl.fut to the.art.sg.fem beach
'We will all go to the beach.'

Juan no sabía qué hacer.
John neg. know.1.sg.imperf what do.inf
'John didn't know what to do.'

it occurs to me I may not fully understand your goal. please clarify:

Referring to example 1 above, there are five words, each of which is
an 'element.' In line 2 there are also five elements, one for each word
in line 1. Each element must be positioned for the longer of the
matching element in each line.

In example 1 above 'All.m.pl' is longer than 'Todos,' so it controls
the position of the second element. Similarly, all the remaining
elements in line 2 are also longer than their counterparts in line 1, so
the elements in line 1 must be spaced out so they start at the same
position as their counterparts below.

Usually the elements in the second line are longer than their
counterparts in the first line, but that doesn't always happen. If an
element in the first line happens to be longer than its counterpart in
line 2, then the element in line 2 must be spaced out so it starts at
the same position as its counterpart above.

Each pair of elements must be aligned vertically.

The third line is just the translation and needs no special spacing.

Here is a PDF with some examples on pages 4 and 5:
https://linguistics.osu.edu/sites/linguistics.osu.edu/files/JPCL-submission-guidelines_0.pdf

#7

On Fri, 8 Jun 2018 14:44:57 -0700
Dave Stevens <geek@uniserve.com> dijo:

as far as I can see spaces would work fine in a monospaced font, why
not use one every time you need to insert a gloss?

Because almost all universities and peer-reviewed journals require APA
style for linguistics, which in turn demands a proportional serif font.
Some even specifically stipulate Times.

#8

I may be misunderstanding what you want to do, but you might be able to cheat a little by using a mix of Index and Paragraph Styles.

    To Define Index Entries

1. Click in a word, or select the words in your document that you
    want to use as an index entry.
2. Choose *Insert - Table of Contents and Index - Index Entry*, and
    do one of the following:

  * To change the text that appears in the index, type the text that
    you want in the *Entry*box. The text that you type here does not
    replace the selected text in the document.
  * To add an index mark to similar words in your document, select
    *Apply to all similar texts*.
  * To add the entries to a custom index, click the *New User-defined
    Index* icon, enter the name of the index, and then click *OK*.

Then...

    To Apply a Different Paragraph Style to an Index Level

1. Right-click in the index or table of contents, and then choose
    *Edit Index or Table of Contents*.
2. Click the *Styles* tab.
3. Click an index level in the *Levels* list.
4. Click the style that you want to apply in the *Paragraph Style* list.
5. Click the assign button *<*.
6. Click *OK*.

From: https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Defining_Index_or_Table_of_Contents_Entries and https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Formatting_an_Index_or_a_Table_of_Contents

Hope this helps.

#9

It might also be possible to use a "Customize" style of "Bullets and Numbering" with Paragraph styles.

#10

On Mon, 11 Jun 2018 12:28:18 -0400
"Paul D. Mirowsky" <p_mirowsky@bentaxna.com> dijo:

It might also be possible to use a "Customize" style of "Bullets and
Numbering" with Paragraph styles.

The problem is that the position of each item in the first and second
lines changes with each gloss. I started just using tabs, but the tabs
were set in Writer > General to 1.25cm, which frequently made a lot of
white space between each word.

I finally figured out a workaround. I made a paragraph style (cleverly
named 'Gloss'), where I stipulated tabs at the width of an 'l' in Times
10pt. I created enough such tabs to allow me to tab all the way across
a long line, although it would take many, many tabs. Now I can adjust
the spacing between items on the line with tabs so that an item on the
first line is aligned with its counterpart on the second line, making
them both start at exactly the same position. My tabs stay at 1.25cm
throughout the document and become very narrow only in text where I
have applied my Gloss style.

I started this quest hoping there would be a feature in LO to do this,
but eventually realized that there was no such feature. On the other
hand, I did discover an extension that adds tools for linguistics. The
extension requires standalone programs, which I installed, but I
haven't figured out yet how to use them. It looks like one of the tools
might do what I'm trying to accomplish here, and without tabs.