Numbered Examples

The gb4e.sty package is my preferred method of handling automatically numbered examples. It can also be used for alignment in examples including glosses and translation. To use this package, include the following in your document’s preamble:

\usepackage{gb4e}

Note that by default, this package modifies the _ and ^ characters to provide subscripts and superscripts outside of math mode (e.g., it allows him_i instead of him$_i$). This is convenient but can also cause conflicts with other packages. These can generally be avoided by loading gb4e last (i.e., make it your last \usepackage command).

Using gb4e

The exe environment is the top-level environment for examples, which are introduced by \ex. Here is a simple example:

	\begin{exe}
		\ex This is a numbered example.
	\end{exe}

Of course, the environment may contain multiple examples. If desired, you can (optionally) specify a grammaticality judgement as the first argument to the \ex command: 

	\begin{exe}
		\ex[*]{Example this ungrammatical is.}
		\ex[??]{This example questionable is.}		
	\end{exe}

Note that this requires you to enclose the example text itself in curly braces, {}. (Using the argument instead of directly typing the grammaticality judgement as the first character of the example is better because the argument will ensure that all examples--both with and without judgements--properly align with each other.)

Glosses

This package can also be used for examples including word-by-word glosses and translations, with automatic alignment of the original laguage to the gloss. This requires two commands within the \ex: \gll (for the sentence-gloss pair) and (optionally) \glt (for the translation). A simple example: 
	\begin{exe}
		\ex \gll la mujer\\
		        the woman\\
		\glt `the woman'
	\end{exe}

This produces:

The package will automatically align the gloss with the original words, and you can use curly braces, {}, to group or skip words in the original or gloss as needed.

Nested Examples

The \xlist environment is used to create embedded examples. For example:

	\begin{exe}
		\ex
			\begin{xlist}
				\ex Example one
				\ex Example two
			\end{xlist}
	\end{exe}
creates the following output:

References

Remember that you can use the \label and \ref commands to create labels in and references to particular examples. This works for both top level and nested examples.

More information

There are more options and uses for this package than I have described here, including more deeply nested examples; customizing or repeating the example's identifier; other shortcuts; and style customizations that may be required for certain journals, style sheets, or personal preferences.

See the gb4e-doc.pdf documentation on the gb4e CTAN page for more.

Additionally, there are a few other packages that provide similar functionality. One such package is ExPex by John Frampton. I have not used such packages extensively but may explore them in the future.