Re: Infixing in interlinears

Trebor Jung said:
> Say there was a root fish, and to form the diminutive, the infix -il- was
> added, thus filish. In an interlinear translation, how would you indicate
> the "splitting" of the root fish, f-...-ish? "fish:diminutive:fish" is
> nonsensical, f'rex.)

My advice for anything but casual glossing is to follow the Leipzig
Glossing Rules (or to devise a superset thereof, if you have situations
that aren't already covered -- which is more likely with conlangs than
natlangs, I reckon).

      http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html


So assuming your example root 'fish' means "cumquat" in English, and
assuming that the -il- infix is left-peripheral, your example in Leipzig
glossing would be:

      f<il>ish
      <DIM>cumquat
      'little cumquat'

If you needed to treat -il- as right-peripheral instead, you'd gloss it as

      cumquat<DIM>

In practice, you're generally going to decide whether an infix is
left-peripheral or right-peripheral on the basis of its relationship to
prefixes and/or suffixes occurring on the same form. If there aren't any,
then you can probably base your decision on the relative phonological
weight of the two parts of the morpheme surrounding the infix. (It's still
just a gloss: you're not automatically claiming that the infix is an
"underlying" prefix or suffix.)

-- Mark

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