If the object language you are discussing differs from your metalanguage, you should gloss your examples. This means that you provide a morpheme-by-morpheme translation of your data. This is what enables us, as linguists, to analyze the structure of languages we ourselves do not speak.

Normally glosses are provided in a three- or four-line format.

In three-line glosses, the first line provides the object language data. The second line provides a morpheme-by-morpheme translation of the object language into the metalanguage. The third line provides a natural, idiomatic translation into the metalanguage. Gonzalez’s example (4a) from the previous section is repeated below to illustrate.

(Gonzalez 2023: 3)

A 4-line gloss is most often used when the phonological processes in the object language make it difficult to identify the morpheme boundaries. In these cases, the first line would provide the object language without modification and the second line would provide the underlying form of each morpheme. The last two lines are the same as in a three-line gloss.

(Déchaine and Wiltschko 2014: 74)

The first line: The object language data

If the object language of your paper is not written with the Latin alphabet but your metalanguage is, then it is convention to transliterate the object language into the Latin alphabet or transcribe it with the IPA. Many languages have a standardized transliteration system which you can use. For example, Mandarin is often transliterated in the system known as pinyin. If you wish to include the original orthography for any reason, you can use a 4-line gloss with the orthography as the first line and a transliteration or transcription in the second line.

Secondly, you must always mark the sentence for its acceptability. If the sentence has no acceptability mark, it means that it is fully acceptable. The most common acceptability marks are shown in Table 1.

The most common acceptability mark is the asterisk (*), which means that it is ungrammatical, or, in other words, morphologically or syntactically ill-formed. It is also sometimes used when it is unclear why a sentence is unacceptable. The question mark (?) is used when a sentence feels weakly ungrammatical. In other words, it feels kind of off, but not fully ungrammatical. The percentage sign (%) is used when there is variation. The example in Table 1 uses positive anymore, which is a grammatical feature of some dialects of US American English and Irish English. Finally, the number sign (#), also sometimes called the hash or pound sign, is used for sentences that are semantically or pragmatically ill-formed. The example in Table 1 is semantically ill-formed because toothbrushes cannot eat.

Sometimes linguists will use multiple asterisks or question marks, or combinations of asterisks and question marks, to indicate degrees of unacceptability.

Sometimes linguists use parentheses to abbreviate multiple examples into one example. If a word is included in the example in parentheses, as in (3a), it means that the word in parentheses is optional. Thus, (3a) means that the sentence is acceptable either without the word quickly, as in (3b), or with the word quickly, as in (3c).

If a word is included in parentheses with an asterisk also inside the parentheses, as in (4a), that means that the word in parentheses may not be included in that position in the sentence but that the sentence is otherwise grammatical. Thus, the notation in (4a) means that the sentence in (4b), without quickly, is grammatical, but the sentence in (4c), with quickly, is ungrammatical.

Finally, if a word is in parentheses with an asterisk outside of the parentheses, as in (5a), it means that the word in the parentheses is obligatory. In other words, the notation in (5a) means that a sentence with the word ate, as in (5b), is grammatical, but the same sentence, with ate omitted, as in (5c), is ungrammatical.

The second line: Morpheme-by-morpheme glossing

In the second line of a three-line gloss, we include a morpheme-by-morpheme translation. The format for the second-line gloss is highly conventionalized. The most common conventions are summarized by the Leipzig Glossing Rules. If you continue on in linguistics, you should refer to the glossing rules when you read and write papers. This explanation is consistent with the Leipzig glossing rules.

Each word in the first line should be aligned with their translation in the second line. When they are not lined up, the examples are much harder to read, as shown by the difference between (6a) and (6b) below. You can line them up manually using spaces and tabs or you can use an invisible table, with each word in a different column.