The following list of morphosyntactic tags is culled with permission* from a draft document, the Eurotyp Guidelines and Lehmann 1983. In it, the authors make an important first step in establishing standards for interlinear morphemic glossing. Given that the Guidelines were a first draft, and primarily intended for language description in the European area, there is certainly room for refinement of both the structural organization and the category labels themselves. With the typological diversity of languages and the theoretical diversity of linguists, it would be futile to list a closed set of terms with standard definitions.The DOBES annotation group is working on both aspects, namely recommendations for a flexible extensible minimal hierarchy of standard terms. We will present a part of this hierarchy in Santa Barbara; a sorted (but largely otherwise unedited) list from EUROTYP is included here for perusal.

(Note that in Eurotyp, all “grammatical category labels” -- actually morphological categories -- are all caps (FUT future), while “grammatical categories” -- best interpreted as syntactic entities -- are abbreviated with the first letter capitalized, the rest in lower case, e.g. AdvP (adverbial phrase).)

*Important note: A revised version of the EUROTYP Guidelines is due to be published in July 2001. We have received permission from Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Koenig to work with the earlier, unpublished version of this list as long as its status as a draft is made clear.

References.

König, Ekkehard (with Dik Bakker, Öesten Dahl, Martin Haspelmath, Maria
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Christian Lehmann, Anna Siewierska). EUROTYP
Guidelines. European Science Foundation Programme in Language Typology,
Dec. 1993.

Lehman, Christian. 1983. Directions for interlinear morphemic
translations. Folia Linguistica 16 : 193-224.