Category: Typological Paper of the Week

All posts concerning my, u/tryddle’s, Typological Paper of the Week activity, coming to reddit every Saturday evening.

Typological Paper of the Week #53: Towards a typology of participles

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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.

Towards a typology of participles (Shagal)

After a quick and very funny joke yesterday, your favourite activity is back on track! This week's paper was submitted by u/Astianthus and provides a typology of participles. This paper is very long, in fact it's a whole academic dissertation! I think the ones that will be most interesting to conlangers are chapters 1-3, but you might as well check out all of them. Participles are forms that are deverbal, meaning they are derived from a verb, and adnominal, meaning they modify a noun. Think of "the broken window": here, "broken" is derived from "to break", a verb, meaning it's deverbal; moreover it's modifying a noun, and is thus an adnominal modifier. There's a lot more to it than that, so read the paper! Now onto the prompts:

  • Does your language have participles?
    • How are they formed? How are they used? What orientation do your participles exhibit (e.g. agent-oriented, patient-oriented, or an oblique category)
    • What is their relation to other deverbal forms, such as converbs or verbal nouns?
    • What is their relation to other adnominal modifiers, such as relative clauses or adjectives?
  • If you considered diachrony while creating your language, how did participles evolve?

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #52: Paraguayan Guaraní and the typology of free affix order

tryddleLeave a comment

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.

Paraguayan Guaraní and the typology of free affix order (Dąbkowski)

In this paper submitted by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate, Dąbkowski presents a typology of free affix order, and discusses how it is present in Paraguayan Guaraní. Free affix order (FAO) describes the phenomenon in which affixes may change their position freely without any modification in meaning. FAO contrasts with scopal and templatic affix order. In scopal affix order, affixes may change their order, but then this also changes the semantics of the whole word. In templatic affix order, the order of affixes is invariant, but their scope may vary. It is this threefold distinction that is probably the most interesting to us conlangers. Now onto the prompts:

  • Which one of the three affix order types is present in your language? Is there another one that is not described in the paper?
    • Which affixes are affected by this? E.g. can only valency-modifying affixes be scopal?
    • How does FAO or other affix order types interact with other parts of your language's morphology?

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #51: Playing with Language — Three Language Games in the Gulf of Guinea

tryddleLeave a comment

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.

Playing with Language: Three Language Games in the Gulf of Guinea (Agostinho & de Araujo)

This week's paper was submitted by fellow mod u/roipoiboy and discusses language games in the gulf of Guinea. While this is not really a typological paper, it'll definitely be nice inspiration for all you conlangers out there! Language games are "the result of a transformation or series of transformations acting regularly on an ordinary language text, with the intent of altering the form but not the content of the original message, for purposes of concealment or comic effect". You might be familiar with Pig Latin: that is a language game in English! Now it's your turn. Let's move onto the prompts:

  • Does your language have language games?
    • How do they work? How do they manifest in everyday life?
    • What are the phonological processes that produce the game's surface forms?
    • In what social contexts does the game appear? Is it exclusively spoken by children?
  • What are some other interesting speech types in your language? Any genderlects, or maybe animal speech?

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #50: Describing definites and indefinites

tryddleLeave a comment

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.

Describing definites and indefinites (Dawson & Jenks)

This week's paper was submitted by u/wmblathers and talks about definiteness. This is a rather well-known grammatical categories (unlike the last one), so you'll probably be able to talk about a lot of things. Here are some prompts:

  • Does your language contrast indefinite and definite nouns?
    • How are they marked?
    • What are their semantics? How are definiteness markers employed in narratives?
    • How do such markers interact with other grammatical categories?
  • What are some other interesting categories that are marked on nouns in your language? (E.g. nominal TAM)

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #49: The grammar of engagement II — typology and diachrony

tryddleLeave a comment

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.

The grammar of engagement II: typology and diachrony (Evans & Bergqvist)

This week's paper was sent to me by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate, and I decided to use it in a TyPoW. According to the paper, "engagement refers to a grammatical system for encoding the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee". It is a relatively newly-established grammatical category, and is, as far as I can tell, not that widely known among us. An example from Andoke, an South American isolate, goes as follows: páa bʌ ʌpóʼkə̃i 'The day is dawning (as we can both see).', páa kẽ ʌpóʼkə̃i 'The day is dawning (as I witness, but which you were not aware of)'. Now onto the prompts:

  • Does your language feature engagement systems?
    • How do they work?
    • Have you considered diachronical processes while creating it?
    • How does engagement interact with other epistemic modes of access?
  • Does your language feature evidentiality or egophoricity?

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #48: Headedness, again

tryddleLeave a comment

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?

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #47: Depictive secondary predicates in crosslinguistic perspective

tryddleLeave a comment

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.

Depictive secondary predicates in crosslinguistic perspective (Schultze-Berndt & Himmelmann)

This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/akamchinjir and talks about so-called depictive secondary predicates, like in George left the party angry. In this clause, left the party is referred to as the "main predicate", while angry is the depictive predicate. Semantically, the main verb is often a verb of motion (to cross), ingestion (to drink) or manipulation. The depictive (or secondary) predicate usually encodes a physical or psychological state or condition (barefoot, cold). There are some further syntactic considerations regarding the distinction between depictive predicates and e.g. resultatives or predicate complements. A definition of the term "depictive secondary predicate" is given in section 2.8, so if you're still not sure if you understand the concept or want a more precise explanation, you can check out that section on page 19 (77). Now onto the prompts:

  • Does your language have secondary predicates at all? Does it feature depictive predicates?
    • What are the semantics of secondary predicates in your language?
    • How are they marked morphologically?
    • How do they contrast to other syntactic constructions like SVCs or adverbs, if they exist?
    • What word classes do depictives belong to in your language?

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #46: Description of the linguistic expressions of fractions

tryddleLeave a comment

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.

Description of the linguistic expressions of fractions (Anicotte)

I found this paper as u/wmblathers posted it, and it seemed very fitting for one of my TyPoWs. We all know about the concept of fractions, but their linguistic expression is rarely talked about. The paper proposes a typology in which there's a distinction between suppletive, non-systematic and analytical, systematic fractional number forms. Now onto the prompts:

  • How does your language express fractions?
    • Which categories (those proposed by the paper) does your language's system fall into?
  • How does your language express other mathematical concepts such as addition or division?

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Submit your papers here!

So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #45: Converbs in an African perspective

tryddleLeave a comment

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)

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

Typological Paper of the Week #44: A typological perspective on nominal concord

tryddleLeave a comment

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.

A typological perspective on nominal concord (Norris)

This week's paper was submitted by u/priscianic and presents a typology study of nominal concord. The paper defines the phenomenon as "[...] the process whereby modifiers
(loosely speaking) in a nominal phrase inflect for morphosyntactic features of that nominal
phrase." Nominal concord is quite well-known through its presence in many European languages, like French or German. Now onto the prompts:

  • Does your language exhibit nominal concord?
    • If so, what concord categories are there? (E.g. gender, number, case)
    • Which words agree with the head noun? Is it restricted in any way, or do all modifiers exhibit nominal concord?
    • How does nominal concord interact with other morphosyntactic phenomena?
    • Is there anything that blocks agreement? Is antiagreement an observable process in your language?

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So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!