Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Coordinating Constructions: An Overview (Haspelmath)
Today's topic is coordinating constructions. These are constructions in which two coonstituents are linked together and have the same status; an example for coordinating constructions in English would be 'my dog and my cat'. While this might seem very boring at first, there are many typological properties that coordinating constructions can exhibit. More on that in the paper! Now for today's prompts:
- How does your language handle coordination? How does it work?
- Does your language exhibit asyndetic, monosyndetic or bisyndetic constructions?
- What semantics are covered by syndesis in your conlang?
- If your language doesn't have coordination at all, how do you express the meaning typically conveyed by coordinating constructions?
- Are conjunctions in your language category-sensitive? Is there any syncretism with * respect to those conjunctions?
- Do your language's conjunctions exhibit polysemy, ie. have got some more usages and meanings than a simple coordinating semantics?
- And finally, are there any syntactic processes like extraction or ellipsis that affect the function of conjunctions in your languages?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next saturday, and happy conlanging!