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.
Exploring Clause Chaining (Dooley)
This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/Astianthus and presents a typology of clause chaining. The paper states clause chaining "is characterized by the possibility of long sequences of foreground clauses with operator dependence, typically within the sentence". To put it in a nutshell, some languages employ chains of dependent clauses as a rhetorical device in narratives, which are also often behaving remarkably regarding morphosyntax or pragmatics. Now let's move onto the prompts:
- Does your language make use of such clause chaining constructions as described in the paper?
- What are the properties of foreground and background clauses in your language?
- Is there overt morphology marking foreground or background clauses?
- In what direction is the dependence aligned? Do the dependent clauses precede independent clauses (prenuclear dependence) or do they follow them (postnuclear dependence)?
- How do background and foreground clauses interact?
- How does the entire phenomenon interact with switch-reference (cf. an earlier TyPoW on the topic here)?
- If your language doesn't feature clause chaining as described in the paper, what other particular devices are commonly used in your language's narratives?
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!