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.
Verbal allocutivity in a crosslinguistic perspective (Antonov)
This week's paper was again brought to me by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate, thank you for that! Allocutivity is an often overlooked but nevertheless very interesting grammatical phenomenon in which in certain circumstances, an addressee who is not an argument of the verb is systematically encoded in all declarative main clause conjugated verb forms. It was first described for Basque, but similar phenomena have been observed in Pumé, Nambikwara, Mandan and Beja. The paper linked above aims to propose a typology of verbal allocutivity. A prototypical example featuring allocutivity from Basque would be Bilbora noa "I am going to Bilbao.", Bilbora noak "I am going to Bilbao." (male addressee) and Bilbora noan "I am going to Bilbao." (female addressee). Now, let's move onto the prompts:
- Does your language feature verbal allocutivity?
- If so, how does it interact with other morphosyntactic categories such as person, TAM or evidentiality?
- Are there any interesting lexicalization processes going on with respect to allocutivity?
- Are there any restrictions regarding which predicates may be marked for allocutivity?
- What are the loci of allocutivity in your language? Does it appear on a sentence- or a word-level?
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!