The two packages gb4e and cgloss4e together provide functionality for glosses, phrase structure rules and example numbering in linguistics.
The example numbering is easy to do and does subexample numbering easily, clearly and in a generally accepted format. Glosses are also fairly easy to use and marks indicating acceptability, grammaticality, attestedness etc. are possible. Phrase structure rules can be produced by defining new commands specifically for this task.
The name of the example counter for the exe environment provided by the gb4e package is exx, and the subcounters are xnumi, xnumi, xnumii, xnumiii and xnumvi, in order of sublevel.
If you’re using \numberwithin{xnumi}{chapter}, where \numberwithin is from the amsmath package, to include the chapter number in the example number, you will want the example number to be reset at the \beginning of each chapter, otherwise things will be weird. In order to reset the counter, call \setcounter{exx}{0} at the beginning of each chapter (after \chapter{}).
