Abstract
This paper presents Advanced Glossing, a proposal for a general glossing format designed for language documentation, and a specific
setup for the Shoebox-program that implements Advanced Glossing to a large extent.
Advanced Glossing (AG) goes beyond the traditional Interlinear Morphemic Translation, keeping syntactic and morphological information
apart from each other in separate glossing tables. AG provides specific lines for different kinds of annotation – phonetic, phonological,
orthographical, prosodic, categorial, structural, relational, and semantic, and it allows for gradual and successive, incomplete, and
partial filling in case that some information may be irrelevant, unknown or uncertain.
The implementation of AG in Shoebox sets up several databases. Each documented text is represented as a file of syntactic glossings.
The morphological glossings are kept in a separate database. As an additional feature interaction with lexical databases is possible. The
implementation makes use of the interlinearizing automatism provided by Shoebox, thus obtaining the table format for the alignment of
lines in cells, and for semi-automatic filling-in of information in glossing tables which has been extracted from databases
