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.
Typology of Generic-Person Marking in Tshobdun Rgyalrong (Sun)
This week's paper is about generic-person (hereafter GP) marking in Tshobdun Rgyalrong, a Sino-Tibetan language from Sichuan. While most of us are probably familiar with the concept of the GP (English 'you' or 'one', cf. 'Do you have to read the paper?' or 'Does one have to read the paper?'; also compare German 'man' and French 'on' in some contexts), its typology is rather overlooked in conlanging. This is why I chose this paper! Now onto the prompts:
- There are several strategies to mark GP that are discussed in the paper; those are the zero strategy, lexical strategies (nominal vs. pronominal) and finally morphological strategies. Which strategies that are listed in the paper does your language make use of?
- Are there several ways to encode the GP in a sentence?
- How do the different strategies interact with each other?
- Are there other GP-marking strategies that are not listed in the paper that are employed in your conlang?
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!