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.
Nonverbal predication in Amazonia: typological and diachronic considerations (Gildea, Overall & Vallejos)
This week's paper introduces the reader to the topic of nonverbal predication. Predicates without verbs are widely used in English: "Your dad is a teacher", "He is sick" or "There is a cat on the table". The paper provides the following definition for such a construction: "nonverbal predication describes the formation of a grammatical clause in which, instead of a verb, some nonverbal element functions as the predicate." There are several types of such predicates described in the paper, including but not limited to nominal, adjectival and existential constructions. Now that I've explained that, let's move onto the prompts:
- How is nonverbal predication expressed in your language?
- Does your language make use of copulas? How did they evolve?
- Are there any morphosyntactic differences when expressing the distinct types of nonverbal predication?
- What syntactic/morphological properties do such constructions have in your language?
- How do the distinct types interact? How is nonverbal predication used in discourse?
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!