Representing contractions in interlineariser

Question

I’m posting a question for a colleague:

In certain clause contexts, two separate words can join together in a contracted form. Each of the words has its own set of affixes. It doesn’t seem possible to show the morphemes of the two different words in the interlineariser. When a space is used, it’s flagged as an error. For example:
uriibashi
u + rir yi + bashi (this is what we would like in the interlinearised line)
NC-person 3sg-preach
“person who preaches”
Do you have any advice on how to treat this?

Answer 1

I think the way it works is that you enter in “urir yibashi” as a word parse, then the interlinear will allow you to parse those individual words.

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Comments

Thanks for this. we tried entering the contraction as a two-word word parse, but then there is no further optionto further parse the individual words. In the example below, unɨɨsonɨ is a contraction of ʊ****nɨr and yɨɨsonɨ and these individual words should then be parsed as ʊ**+ nɨr** and yɨ+ yɨ+ sonɨ

ʊnɨɨsonɨ ‘sinner’ (contracted form)

ʊnɨr yɨɨsonɨ '‘person of sin’ (non-contracted form)

ʊ+ nɨr yɨ+ yɨ+ sonɨ (fully parsed)

ᴄʟ+ person ᴀᴍ+ ᴄʟ+ sin (gloss of morphemes)

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I would like to clarify what I think the situation in Paratext is.
When I have a word which is a contraction of two words, and both of those two words have affixes, then I can’t interlearise it in Paratext.
When I add a word parse for the contraction, I can put all the morphemes of the first word, but if the second has a prefix then Paratext does not accept it, because “Prefixes must come before a stem”. There are in fact two stems, and there is a prefix on the second stem, but Paratext is presumabling only recognising the first as a stem.
Example:
u+ nir +yi soni - Paratext accepts this because it sees +yi as a suffix to nir. But this is not the correct situation, we want:

u+ nir yi+ soni - Paratext will not accept this because “Prefixes must come before a stem”. Here, soni is a stem.

Is it possible to change this behaviour so that Paratext recognises the second stem and allows the prefix?

Thanks
anon282486

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Following up on this, my best suggestion with the current behaviour of Paratext was to represent prefixes and suffixes as usual before and after the 2 stems, but represent any suffixes to the first stem or prefixes to the second stem with a hyphen (not +) so that actually Paratext sees the following:
PRE+ STEM1-SUFF1 PRE2-PRE2b-STEM2 +SUFF
as identical to
PRE+ STEM1 STEM2 +SUFF

Then you can gloss each part that Paratext recognises: STEM1-SUFF1 with matching hyphens person-DEF. With a crazily agglutinating and contracting language this seems the best way to provide consultants with something readable, but doesn’t really let Paratext learn what all the affixes are doing. That said, Paratext just doesn’t have the ability as far as I can see it to learn how lots of affixes work and figure out analysis of words where the same segments might have a range of contextually-defined meanings or analyses. Fieldworks is going to be better at that because you can supply more details.