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.
A cross-linguistic study of case and switch-reference in unrelated languages (Nonato & Souza)
This week's paper was submitted by u/Slorany and talks about switch-reference and case in unrelated languages. Switch-reference refers to the case in which a multiverbal construction is marked for having co-referential (same-subject marking) or distinct subjects (different-subjects). If you want to learn more about switch-reference, check out the wikipedia page on it (There are some papers about the topic linked on the bottom of it.) Now let's move onto the prompts:
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Does your language exhibit switch-reference?
- If so, how does it work, both morphologically and syntactically? Are conjunctions inherently same-subject or different-subject? Or are there morphemes that mark these categories?
- If not, how would you construct sentences where the two subjects are co-referential or distinct?
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What morphosyntactic alignment does your language exhibit?
- What role does case play in your conlang? Is your language's morphosyntactic alignment encoded by case, or by something else?
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!