Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today I bring with me a new activity called the Typological Paper of the Week. In this weekly activity, I will present a linguistic paper that could be useful to your conlanging process. Additionally, I will present a few prompts to spark discussion in the comments. There will also be the possibility for you (yes, you!) to submit a paper that you find cool/have read recently/seems useful to conlanging itself in the form below. I've talked enough now, let's move on to today's paper:
Understanding and explaining applicatives (Mithun)
Today's topic is all about applicatives. Now you may ask, 'but what are applicatives?'. Applicatives are derivational processes which add an oblique non-core argument to the set of core arguments. Don't get it? Read the paper, and thou shalt be enlightened. As promised, now for today's prompt:
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Does your language have applicatives?
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If not, what are some other valency-modifying processes?
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If yes, how do they behave, what do they do? Are there any constraints on what they can't do? What kind of applicatives are there? (e.g. benefactives, instrumental, directional)
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Does your language have other means of expressing the categories that could be marked by applicatives?
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next saturday, and happy conlanging!
As you might suspect, my conlangs lack applicatives.
I didn’t know(tice) before how (semantically) broad of an argument an applicative can promote. Especially interesting to me was (4) where the promoted argument “seller” is actually rather agentive in another sense, the selling sense which is at least in English closely intertwined with buying, but not with respect to the matrix verb meaning “to buy” of course. I think there is some fun stuff you could build around this insight. Maybe one could just have a ‘buy’ verb and a ‘sell’ verb and compound/SVC them to get a ditransitive “buy+sell Buyer Seller Theme” construction.