Category: Typological Paper of the Week

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.

---

Focused assertion of identity: A typology of intensifiers (König & Gast)

This week's paper was submitted by u/wmblathers and talks about the different ways in which languages handle intensifiers. The paper presents several cross-linguistic patterns and also describes the various uses of intensifiers, a class of words such as "himself/herself" in English, "selbst" in German or "ipse/ipsa" in Latin. Now onto the prompts:

• How do you express intensification in your language?
• Do your language's patterns line up with the cross-linguistic patterns described in the paper?
• If you considered diachrony while creating your language, how did intensifiers arise? (Common grammaticalization paths include e.g. body parts, expressions for "one/alone" or lexical items referring to concepts like "soul" or "life")
• How do intensifiers interact with other parts of your language's morphosyntax? (E.g. are there any restrictions on their usage in certain constructions?)

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!

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!

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.

---

Antipassive constructions in Jê languages: typological convergences and divergences (Miranda & Sansò)

This week's paper talks about antipassives in Jê languages, a language family from Brazil. While we've already discussed applicatives and causatives, there hasn't been a paper on antipassives on TyPoW. "Antipassive" refers to a valency-modifying operation in which the object is either ommitted completely or demoted to oblique status, thus decreasing the verb's valency by one. If you want some more examples for antipassive constructions, check out the Wikipedia page here. Now onto the prompts:

• Does your language feature antipassive constructions?
  • If so, how does it handle the demoted O? Is it omitted, does it take an oblique role?
  • How does the antipassive interact with other morphosyntactic constructions (e.g. causatives)?
  • How are antipassives used in conversations? Are there any particular pragmatics attached to them?
  • If you considered diachronics when creating your language, how did antipassives arise?
• If your language doesn't feature antipassives, what other kinds of valency-decreasing processes are there (e.g. passives)?

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!

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 cross-linguistic patterns of phonation types (Esposito & Khan)

This week's paper was submitted by u/MerlinMusic and describes the cross-linguistic patterns that appear with respect to phonation types. Phonation, also known as voice quality, describes the production of sounds by the vocal folds. There are several categories on the phonation spectrum, all of which can be included in your language. The paper already provides a good overview, but if you want another resource, you can check out the Wikipedia page on phonation here. Now let me present this week's prompts:

• What voice quality contrasts are there in your language, if any?
  • Are only consonants, only vowels, or both affected?
• How do other features (e.g. duration) interact with phonation?
• If your language is tonal, does phonation interact with the tone-bearing unit?

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!

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.

---

Instrumental Prefixes in Amerindian Languages: an overview to their meanings, origin and functions (Palancar)

This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/PyrolatrousCoagulate and talks about the phenomenon of instrumental prefixes in a number of Amerindian languages from North America. The functioning of these prefixes can be illustrated using an example from Kashaya Pomo, where there are different prefixes for when actions that are performed using different body parts. Later in the paper it becomes clearer that not only body part instruments may be encoded by such prefixes, but also other semantic categories like natural forces (fire/heat, cold, water) or object classifiers (stone-like objects, sharp-edged objects). Let's move onto the prompts now:

• Are there instrumental prefixes similar to those discussed in the paper in your language?
• If not, how does your language express such meanings? (E.g. by noun incorporation)
• How do instrumental constructions in general work in your language?

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!

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.

---

From 'wood' to future tense: Nominal origins of the future construction in Hup (Epps)

This week's paper discusses an unusual grammaticalization path in the Nadahup language Hup, spoken on the border of Colombia and Brazil. While this topic is once again very specific, in the comments you can talk about any fun grammaticalization processes that occurred or are occurring in your language. If you don't know what grammaticalization is, check out the introductory Wikipedia article. If you want to learn more about the possible grammaticalization paths that are attested in natural languages, check out the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Now onto the prompts:

• Are there constructions in your language that have undergone grammaticalization or are currently undergoing grammaticalization?
• Are there any lexicalization processes in your language?

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!

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.

---

Tone: Is it Different? (Hyman)

This week's paper was posted by luy on the subreddit's Discord server, and I decided to use it as a TyPoW. It provides a general overview of what tone is, what kind of misconceptions there are among linguists and delivers some thorough natlang examples. If you're not familiar with the concept of tone at all, check out the Wikipedia page on it. Now onto this week's prompts:

• Is your language tonal?
  • How many phonemic tones are there in your language?
  • What's the tone-bearing unit (e.g. syllable or mora)?
  • How does tone behave morphophonologically? Are there any processes going on (e.g. tone sandhi)?
  • Does tone interact with phonation in your language?
  • Are there register or contour tones in your language? Is there a combination of both?
• How did tones arise in your language? Did tonogenesis or tonoexodus occur?
• Does your language exhibit pitch-accent?
• If your language is not tonal, tell us about its intonation patterns!

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!

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.

---

Nominal Tense in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Nordlinger & Sadler)

This week's paper provides a cross-linguistic view on the topic of nominal tense. While tense is traditionally considered a verbal category, it may also appear on nominals in some languages. Phrases like 'my former' in 'my former house' can be expressed by a single affix in these languages. Some even mark other non-tense categories, like mood and evidentiality on nouns (e.g. Nambiquara wa³lin³-su³-n³ti² 'this manioc root that both you and I saw recently'). Now let's move onto the prompts:

• Does your language feature nominal tense?
  • Which tenses can nominals be marked for?
  • How does it interact with possession?
  • How does it interact with definiteness and articles, if there are any?
  • Can nominal tense morphemes be stacked? What semantics does such a stacking yield?
• If your language does not feature nominal tense, is there any special way in which your language expresses such contexts?

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!

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.

---

Nonverbal predication in Amazonia: typological and diachronic considerations (Gildea, Overall & Vallejos)

This week's paper introduces the reader to the topic of nonverbal predication. Predicates without verbs are widely used in English: "Your dad is a teacher", "He is sick" or "There is a cat on the table". The paper provides the following definition for such a construction: "nonverbal predication describes the formation of a grammatical clause in which, instead of a verb, some nonverbal element functions as the predicate." There are several types of such predicates described in the paper, including but not limited to nominal, adjectival and existential constructions. Now that I've explained that, let's move onto the prompts:

• How is nonverbal predication expressed in your language?
  • Does your language make use of copulas? How did they evolve?
  • Are there any morphosyntactic differences when expressing the distinct types of nonverbal predication?
• What syntactic/morphological properties do such constructions have in your language?
• How do the distinct types interact? How is nonverbal predication used in discourse?

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!

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.

---

Introduction: associated motion as a grammatical category in linguistic typology (Guillaume & Koch)

This week's paper was submitted by u/dendanacode and introduces the linguistic category of associated motion. Associated motion is defined by this paper as " verbal grammatical category, separate from tense, aspect, mood and direction, whose function is to associate, in different ways, different kinds of translational motion (spatial displacement / change of location) to a (generally non-motion) verb event". An English approximation would be e.g. "to go and V", "to come and V", "to come while Ving", etc. Now let's move onto the prompts:

• Is associated motion (AM) a distinct grammatical category in your language?
  • How is it marked?
  • If you evolved your language diachronically, how did the AM markers arise?
• If AM is not a grammatical category, how do you encode these expressions in your language?

(You can also check out a recent Conlangery episode on the topic here)

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!