The gloss of a multifunctional grammatical morph consists of a set of symbols. These are separated by a period, as in Germ. Tisch-es ‘table-GEN.SG’. The same rule applies in the situation where one L1 lexeme is glossed by more than one L2 words. These, too, are separated by a period, as in Germ. fabulier-en ‘invent.stories-INF’.

Lexical stems fall into grammatical classes. Noun stems, for instance, have gender; verb stems have valence. If such grammatical categories are covert, this information is not deducible from (the gloss of) the lexical meaning. If it is of morphological relevance, it can be represented in the gloss of the stem. Relevant examples include Latin gender, as in puellae ‘girl.F:NOM.PL’, and Yucatec transitivity, as in hats’-ah ‘beat.TR-CMPL’; both discussed more fully in the section on allomorphy. Such morphological categories of lexical stems are then treated formally in the gloss like morphological features of grammatical formatives.

The period between values of different morphological categories cumulated in one morpheme is dispensable between person, gender and number, provided the resulting letter sequence is unambiguous. Thus, Latin lauda-mus may be glossed as ‘praise(PRS.IND)-1.PL’ or ‘praise(PRS.IND)-1PL’.

Rule 24. Symbols of a gloss that represent semantic components or morphological features of one L1 morph are separated by a period (.).
The period between values of different morphological categories cumulated in one morpheme is dispensable between person, gender and number, provided the resulting letter sequence is unambiguous.

A special case of a multifunctional morph is the pronominal index which cross-references two actants of a verb. This is treated in the section on pronominal indexes.

Some grammatical category labels are themselves compound, although they designate one value of some parameter. Immediate future and Hodiernal past are examples. The components of the abbreviation may be merged into one continuous abbreviation, e.g. ImmFut. Otherwise, the period may be used to join them, too: Imm.Fut, provided the misunderstanding is forestalled that the components refer to two distinct features.