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.
The Blue Bird of Ergativity (DeLancey)
This week's paper was submitted by my fellow conlanger and friend u/Lichen000 and it's all about ergativity. To be honest it's rather a linguistic essay than a typological paper but some variety cannot do any harm. Now while at first it may seem like that you can only participate in this specific challenge when your conlang is "ergative", I've included some more general prompts as well, so that everyone can talk about something. Now onto said prompts:
- Does your language exhibit morphological or syntactic ergativity?
- If so, how do these ergative features work and interact with each other?
- There is no natural language on Earth that is exclusively ergative, but if you're not going for naturalism, your conlang might be entirely ergative! If not, what kind of ergativity split is there? Is it based on tense, person or something different?
- Can the labels S, A and O be applied to your conlang? If so, how are they distinguished? If not, how does your language handle argument structure?
- Some more general prompts:
- What morphosyntactic alignment type does your language fall into? Is it nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, active-stative or something entirely different?
- What syntactic pivots appear in your language?
- Any morphosyntactic features that are unexpected? How do these exceptions work?
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!