How do you do an interlinear gloss for an analytic language?

Question

I have reviewed the Liepzig Rules, and google searches are failing me.

They don't say much about glossing words that don't have any internal morphology. The gloss of an analytic language by these rules would be a word-for-word translation without any guideposts as to the role of anything, with the exception of free pronouns and a few function words being being replaced with more opaque abbreviations.

Is there a way to gloss an analytic language that has the richness of information that would be found in the gloss of a more fusional or synthetic language?

I happen to be glossing an artificial language, but that is beside the point. Pointers on how to gloss Chinese, or Khmer or the like would be helpful, too.

Answer 1

Interlinear glossing for isolating languages is often done without any extra tiers or labels beyond the usual ones. This is largely because, as is pointed out in a comment, the free translation in an interlinear gloss provides a way into understanding the constituency, even where this is not shown by morphosyntax and associated morphemic gloss.

But extra forms of labelling are sometimes used to show constituency. These amount to a kind of bracketing (although they may not use actual brackets) and may be placed on an extra tier. Christian Lehmann discusses this, with examples, in section 4.7 of this paper on interlinear glossing, though he urges keeping bracketing to a minimum.

Another example of constituency labelling is in this article on the isolating language Weining Ahmao (Miao-Yao/Hmong-Mien family, China), particularly pp 590ff. The glossed texts are also nice examples of the previous point about the use of free translations to understand the phrase structure of the vernacular text.

The WP article on the grammar of Vietnamese (the canonical isolating language) also has numerous examples with interlinear glosses and in a number of cases uses labelled coloured bars to show constituency.