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 #23: Ditransitive alignment splits and inverse alignment

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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.

Ditransitive alignment splits and inverse alignment (Haspelmath)

This week's paper was submitted by u/Anhilare and talks about four universals of ditransitive marking, two of them concerning split alignment patterns, and two of them concerning inverse alignment patterns. In this week's TyPoW you will be able to talk about ditransitive constructions in your conlang! I hope the paper will broaden your linguistic horizons with regards to morphosyntactic alignment. Now onto the prompts:

  • How do ditransitive constructions work in your language?
    • Do ditransitives exhibit indirective, neutral or secundative alignment?
    • Have you invented a completely new pattern for your language?
  • If your language is inverse-marking, how does that aspect of its morphosyntax interact with ditransitive 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!

Typological Paper of the Week #22: Classifiers and Noun Classes – Semantics

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.

Classifiers and Noun Classes: Semantics (Aikhenvald)

This week's paper was submitted by u/Lichen000 and talks about the typology of noun categorization, or more specifically, about the typology of noun classes and classifiers. If you don't know what either of those are, worry not! You can check out the wikipedia pages of noun classes and classifiers here, or you can simply read the linked paper. Here are this week's prompts:

  • Does your language have noun classes or classifiers?
    • How many classes/classifiers are there?
    • How does the type of noun categorization that is present in your language appear in morphosyntactic constructions? (e.g. agreement etc)
    • How do the noun classes/classifiers reflect your conpeople's worldview, if at all?
    • Based on what properties are nouns categorized 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!

Typological Paper of the Week #21: On the typology of negative 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.

On the typology of negative concord (van der Auwera & Van Alsenoy)

This week's paper was once again submitted by u/Slorany and talks about negative concord in various languages. Negative concord refers to the phenomenon in which a semantically single negation is expressed both by a clause level negator and by a negative adverb, pronoun or determiner. This paper gives an example from English: "I can't get no satisfaction"; here, n't represents the clausal level negator and no is the negative determiner. Even though there are two negation markers, the sentence is not negated twice, but only once. As with previous TyPoWs, our topic today is very specific. Thus, I have decided that in this thread you can talk about everything and anything that got to do with negation! Nevertheless I will give some prompts to guide you a bit. Here they are:

  • Does your language exhibit any kind of negative concord?
  • How does negation generally work in your language?
    • Has your language gone through Jespersen's Cycle? How has it affected the general morphosyntax of 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!

Typological Paper of the Week #20: Causative constructions in Ainu: A typological perspective with remarks on the 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.

Causative constructions in Ainu: A typological perspective with remarks on the diachrony (Bugaeva)

This week's paper was submitted by u/Lysimachiakis and talks about causative constructions in the language isolate Ainu, spoken on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Causatives are a valency-modifying operation in which a verb's argument structure is augmented by introducing a new argument, the 'causer'. A simple clause like 'The man eats fish', in which 'the man' represents the A and 'fish' represents the O, can be causativized as follows: the new argument, viz. the causer, (e.g. 'I') is introduced to the clause, while the original A/O are demoted. The result is 'I made the man eat fish'. Note that there might be some differences on the formation of causatives in distinct languages; take a look at the paper to see how the Ainu language handles it! Now onto this week's prompts:

  • How do causative constructions work in your language?
    • Are periphrastic and morphological causatives distinct in your language?
    • Are there differences between causatives derived from intransitives and transitives?
  • What are other noteworthy valency-modifying operations 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!

Typological Paper of the Week #19: Future reference with and without future marking

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.

Future reference with and without future marking (Bochnak)

This week's paper was submitted by fellow conlanger and linguist u/priscianic and talks about future events and whether they are marked accordingly. Nevertheless you will be able to talk about any aspect concerning future reference and/or future marking in your conlang here! Let's move onto the prompts:

  • How does your language encode that events will/might occur in the future?
    • Is the morphological future marking used for anything else besides future events?
    • Is there an overlap between simple future reference and modality?
  • Is there any discrepancy between the usage of the future marker and the encoding of future events in general?

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!

Typological Paper of the Week #18: Nominalization in Numhpuk Singpho

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.

Nominalization in Numhpuk Singpho (Morey)

This week's paper is concerned with nominalization in the Numhpuk variety of the Tibeto-Burman language Singpho. Nominalization generally refers to the morphological process in which a noun is derived from a word of another word class. Genetti 2008 notes that there are two subtypes of nominalizations: derivational nominalization, which derives a lexical noun from a lexical root, and clausal nominalization, which applies to a clause and derives a noun phrase. Today you can write anything that's got to do with nominalization in your language! To give you some input, here are this week's prompts:

  • How does nominalization generally work in your language?
    • Is there a syntactic or morphological distinction between derivational and clausal nominalization?
    • What is nominalization used for?
  • Are there any other interesting derivational processes going on 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!

Typological Paper of the Week #17: Upward Oriented Complementizer Agreement in Kipsigis

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.

Upward Oriented Complementizer Agreement in Kipsigis (Diercks & Rao)

This week's paper talks about complementizer agreement (CA) in the Nilotic language Kipsigis. With CA, the complementizing verb's subject agrees with the complementizer (e.g. English 'that' in 'He said that they are cute') in some way, whether it be for number or some other grammatical category. Now I know that CA is a very specific topic, so I decided that in this week's TyPoW you can also just talk about complementizing constructions in general. Here are the prompts:

  • Does your language even have complementizers?
    • Does CA occur? How do your conlang's complementizers work syntactically and morphologically?
  • How are the phrases that are introduced by such complementizers handled?
  • Are there any syntactic processes or transformations going on with respect to complementizers and their phrases?

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!

Typological Paper of the Week #16: Comparative Constructions: An Introduction

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.

Comparative Constructions: An Introduction (Treis)

This week's paper was submitted by u/Anhilare and talks about the typology of comparative constructions. Important notions when discussing this topic are the comparee ("what is being compared against some standard of comparison", e.g. Mary), the standard of comparison ("what the comparee is being compared against", e.g. Peter), the standard marker ("marker of the grammatical function of the standard", e.g. than), the parameter of comparison ("property of comparison", e.g. tall) and finally the degree marker, which marks the degree of presence or absence of a property in the comparee, e.g. more or -er. The examples given for each term may be combined in one sentence: "Mary is taller than Peter". Now that I have discussed these terms, let's move onto the prompts. When you answer them, feel free to make use of these terms.

  • How does comparison work in your language?
    • Are there differences between the distinct adjective degrees? If so, how do they manifest?
    • Are there differences between quantitative and qualitative comparisons?
  • How do adjectives work in your language in general? How are they negated?

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!

Typological Paper of the Week #15: A cross-linguistic study of case and switch-reference in unrelated languages

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 cross-linguistic study of case and switch-reference in unrelated languages (Nonato & Souza)

This week's paper was submitted by u/Slorany and talks about switch-reference and case in unrelated languages. Switch-reference refers to the case in which a multiverbal construction is marked for having co-referential (same-subject marking) or distinct subjects (different-subjects). If you want to learn more about switch-reference, check out the wikipedia page on it (There are some papers about the topic linked on the bottom of it.) Now let's move onto the prompts:

  • Does your language exhibit switch-reference?

    • If so, how does it work, both morphologically and syntactically? Are conjunctions inherently same-subject or different-subject? Or are there morphemes that mark these categories?
    • If not, how would you construct sentences where the two subjects are co-referential or distinct?

  • What morphosyntactic alignment does your language exhibit?

    • What role does case play in your conlang? Is your language's morphosyntactic alignment encoded by case, or by something else?

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!

Typological Paper of the Week #14: Epistemicity and Deixis: Perspectives from Central Alaskan Yupʼik

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.

Epistemicity and Deixis: Perspectives from Central Alaskan Yupʼik (Tamura)

This week's paper was submitted by u/Lichen000 and talks about deixis in Central Alaskan Yupʼik. This might seem similar to the third edition of this activity which talked about spatial prefixes in Dargi, but this time I'm taking a slightly different approach. Instead, today I shall focus on demonstratives and, by extension, determiners. Now onto the prompts:

  • Are there articles, determiners or demonstratives being used in your language?
    • If not, how do you express concepts like spatial proximity ('this house' vs. 'that house') or definiteness ('a man' vs. 'the man')?
    • If these exist, how do they work morphologically and syntactically? Are there any interesting distinctions like visibility or accessibility?
  • How did articles etc. evolve, if you considered diachronics while creating 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!