title: Morphological Glossing of Mayan Languages under XML: Preliminary Results
title: Working Paper 4
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Sachse, Frauke
name: Dürr, Michael
Publisher: name: Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya
Year: 2016
Subjects: subject: Mayan languages

description: This paper summarises the results of a workshop that was held at the Department for the Anthropology of the Americas of the University of Bonn between 4-6 September 2014. The workshop was a joint initiative of the research project Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya (TWKM = Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan) and the research group developing the software application Tool for Systematic Annotation of Colonial K’iche’ (TSACK) and aimed at discussing and defining standardised conventions for the linguistic description and glossing of Mayan language forms under XML.
        Grammatical descriptions of Mayan languages exhibit a plethora of descriptive standards. Produced by different linguists of different backgrounds with different research objectives, they reflect the diverse theoretical orientations of the linguistic discipline, ranging from formal descriptions of the structural or generative type to prescriptive grammars for the use in language teaching. Functionally identical forms are found to be analysed and glossed rather differently, depending on the purpose of description or the theoretical model applied. Even edited volumes usually maintain the personal preferences of authors, which may result in the ‘third person singular ergative’ being variously glossed in one and the same volume as “3erg”, “3sE”, “3SE”, “3sgE”, or –following a common standard of distinguishing pronominal sets A (ergative) and B (absolutive)– as “3a”, “3sA”, “3sg.A”, “3SG.A”, “a3S”, “A3s”, “A3” and “A.3” (see Avelino 2011 among others). Although there are justifications for maintaining different conventions, these constitute a source of potential confusion; in the case of the just mentioned example the abbreviation, “A” might be mistaken for the equally common gloss of the absolutive pronoun. Few attempts have been made to compare and integrate this material and provide a standardised and generally applicable descriptive terminology that can help to analyse grammatical development in the Mayan language family.
        Any attempt to make the data of different Mayan languages comparable requires the definition of set conventions for glossing and typological description. As a prerequisite to the analysis of Classic Mayan by systematic comparison with modern and historic languages of the Mayan family, the TWKM-project will need to decide on such conventions. By choosing conventions that other corpus projects on Mayan languages operating within the same XML-based environment can share, the data would become comparable and permit comprehensive analysis of semantic and grammatical structure across corpora in the TextGrid repositories. Thus, standardising the rules for glossing would create the necessary infrastructure for a network of Mayan language database projects within the TextGrid environment.
        The aim of the workshop was to identify and discuss difficulties and problems in interlinear glossing of Mayan languages and use them as a basis for defining the conventions and rules of linguistic description under XML. The languages that were primarily focused on during the workshop, thus, included K’iche’ (colonial and modern), Ch’ol, Modern Yukatek and Classic Mayan. Accordingly, the following summary presents results that are only preliminary and are not yet meant as a defined standard, but as a basis for further discussion.