Lezgian morpheme-by-morpheme interlinear gloss

What this example shows

This Lezgian sentence means “Now their farm will not stay behind forever”. Lezgian is a Northeast Caucasian language that stacks case endings on nouns and builds the future and negation as separate pieces on the verb. The clause Gila abur-u-n ferma hamišaluǧ güǧüna amuqʼ-da-č is glossed morpheme by morpheme to keep each piece visible.

Case stacking and verb pieces

Two words carry several morphemes each:

abur-u-n them-OBL-GEN

A pronoun with an oblique stem and a genitive ending, “their”. The case markers stack one after another.

amuqʼ-da-č stay-FUT-NEG

The verb stem “stay”, the future suffix, and the negation suffix, three morphemes in one word.

The matching-hyphen rule

Leipzig conventions require the gloss line to have the same number of hyphens as the word above it, so abur-u-n with two hyphens is glossed them-OBL-GEN with two hyphens. The rule keeps each morpheme directly tied to its label, which matters when one word holds three or four pieces. The diagram lines them up so the counts are easy to check.

Glossing conventions used here

OBL marks an oblique stem, GEN a genitive, FUT the future, and NEG negation. Each is a separate morpheme with its own hyphen, the format used for languages with rich case and verb morphology.

For the case and tense labels:

• glossing abbreviations cheat sheet

Recreate it in the editor

Open the example, set the morpheme boundary character under Settings → Tokens, and upload a custom font if your transcription uses characters a default font lacks. Export the diagram as PNG, SVG, or PDF for a grammar or a handout.

See also

Related examples:

• Turkish case and verb morphology shows case and person suffixes on one clause.
• Avar interlinear gloss shows agreement and negation in another Caucasian language.