IGT Standards

Page Index

• Introduction
• Leipzig Glossing Rules
• Lehmann's Rules

Introduction

Various sources offer recommendations of best practices concerning IGT. This page provides an overview of two sources of standards. Please note that this is by no means an exhaustive survey of reputable recommendations.

Leipzig Glossing Rules

One respected linguistic group produced the Leipzip Glossing Rules. The rules were developed by the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Department of Linguistics of the University of Leipzig. Their ten rules concern:

1. word-by-word alignment
2. morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence
3. grammatical category labels
4. one-to-many correspondences
5. person and number labels
6. non-overt elements
7. bi-partite elements
8. infixes
9. inherent categories
10. reduplication

Lehmann's Rules

Lehmann offers 32 rules for dealing with morphology in an IGT. The rules concern glossing, boundary symbols and typographic conventions. When these, or any, standards are consistently followed, there is less risk of confusion and ambiguity.