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.
Converbs in an African perspective
This week's paper talks about converbs in Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages. Haspelmath & König's book "Converbs in Cross-Linguistic Perspective" defines a converb as "a nonfinite verb form whose main function is to mark adverbial subordination". A basic English example for this is "He's walking down the street singing songs", where the expressed sense of subordination is simultaneous ("while"). Now onto the prompts:
- Does your language feature converbs?
- Which categories are expressed by converbs? (E.g. temporal sequence, conditional semantics etc.)
- How does switch-reference interact with converbs in your language?
- How can the syntax of converb constructions be described?
- If your language does not have converbs, how is adverbial subordination expressed? (E.g. by conjunctions)
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!