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.
Headedness, again (Polinsky)
This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/roipoiboy and presents another look at headedness in combination with the noun-verb ratio in various languages. Being probably one of the first typological notions many conlangers encounter, headedness talks about the order of heads and their dependents. While a strict dichotomy between head-initial and head-final is often propagated among conlangers, it's really more of a spectrum, at least according to this paper. Now let's move onto the prompts:
- What headedness type does your language classify as?
- Is it rather head-final or head-initial?
- What constituent orders does your language exhibit?
- What are the distributional properties of nouns and verbs like?
- How do nouns and verbs differ? In what ways are they the same?
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!