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.

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Damn your eyes! (Not really) Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands (Aikhenvald)

This week's paper is about a special type of command, viz. imperative imprecatives. This type of imperative is used to curse the listener or a non-SAP person, like for example in English 'Go to hell!', 'Bugger off!' or the one in the title of this paper, 'Damn your eyes!'. There are several strategies to express such constructions presented in the article; in this TyPoW I will divide the prompts into two parts: first there are some general prompts on how imperatives work in your conlang, and afterwards you get to discuss how imprecatives and curses function! Now onto said prompts:

• How do imperatives work in your language?

  • How are optatives, hortatives and other types of imperatives distinguished in your conlang (if at all)?
  • Are there any restrictions or exceptions on how imperatives may be constructed?
  • Are there any unusual distinctions regarding your language's imperatives? (E.g. a temporal distinction ("Do so now!" vs. "Do so later!") or a spatial distinction ("Do now!" vs. "Do later!"))

• How do you curse in your language?

  • What different ways are there to express curses in your conlang? Are there any differences depending on whom is being cursed?
  • If you considered diachronics while creating your languages, are there any semantic changes/drifts that affected curses or imprecatives?
  • How are imperative imprecatives and curses as commands formed in your conlang?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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Evidentiality in Boran and Witotoan languages (Wojtylak)

This week's paper is on evidentiality in two South American language families, namely, the Boran and Witotoan languages. Evidentiality encodes how a speaker obtains information: you can have markers for when an event has been observed, for assumptions based on evidence, for non-visual sensory input, and much more. Now onto today's prompts:

• Does your language have evidential markers?
  • If so, which categories are distinguished? (E.g. visual/non-visual/inferred, sensory/non-sensory etc.)
  • How do these morphemes work on a semantic levels? How do they interact with each other or with other morphological features?
  • Are there any exceptions regarding the expected behaviour of these markers in your language?
• If your language does not feature evidentiality as a grammatical category, how are contexts like 'I saw him shoot the man' and other meanings that are commonly encoded by evidentiality expressed?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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The Blue Bird of Ergativity (DeLancey)

This week's paper was submitted by my fellow conlanger and friend u/Lichen000 and it's all about ergativity. To be honest it's rather a linguistic essay than a typological paper but some variety cannot do any harm. Now while at first it may seem like that you can only participate in this specific challenge when your conlang is "ergative", I've included some more general prompts as well, so that everyone can talk about something. Now onto said prompts:

• Does your language exhibit morphological or syntactic ergativity?
  • If so, how do these ergative features work and interact with each other?
  • There is no natural language on Earth that is exclusively ergative, but if you're not going for naturalism, your conlang might be entirely ergative! If not, what kind of ergativity split is there? Is it based on tense, person or something different?
  • Can the labels S, A and O be applied to your conlang? If so, how are they distinguished? If not, how does your language handle argument structure?
• Some more general prompts:
  • What morphosyntactic alignment type does your language fall into? Is it nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, active-stative or something entirely different?
  • What syntactic pivots appear in your language?
  • Any morphosyntactic features that are unexpected? How do these exceptions work?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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Tense, but in the Mood: Diachronic Perspectives on the Representation of Time in Ao (Coupe)

This week's typological paper is all about time; specifically, it's on the representation of time in the Tibeto-Burman language Ao. As this is a quite specific topic, I ventured to expand the prompts a bit beyond what the paper actually talks about. Now onto said prompts:

• How does your language handle tense, aspect and mood?
  • How do they interact? Are there any restrictions on how they interact?
  • Any notable allomorphy going on regarding the morphemes that encode TAM in your conlang?
• If you considered diachronics while constructing your language, how did TAM evolve? How did it change?
  • Were there any grammaticalization processes going on?
• How does modality combine with the other TAM categories? (Presupposing they are distinct)

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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Typology of Generic-Person Marking in Tshobdun Rgyalrong (Sun)

This week's paper is about generic-person (hereafter GP) marking in Tshobdun Rgyalrong, a Sino-Tibetan language from Sichuan. While most of us are probably familiar with the concept of the GP (English 'you' or 'one', cf. 'Do you have to read the paper?' or 'Does one have to read the paper?'; also compare German 'man' and French 'on' in some contexts), its typology is rather overlooked in conlanging. This is why I chose this paper! Now onto the prompts:

• There are several strategies to mark GP that are discussed in the paper; those are the zero strategy, lexical strategies (nominal vs. pronominal) and finally morphological strategies. Which strategies that are listed in the paper does your language make use of?
  • Are there several ways to encode the GP in a sentence?
  • How do the different strategies interact with each other?
• Are there other GP-marking strategies that are not listed in the paper that are employed in your conlang?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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The Phonology of Kisi Ideophones (Childs)

This week's typological paper is about the phonology of ideophones in the Niger-Congo (West Atlantic) language Kisi. Doke (1935:118) gives the definition of an ideophone as a "vivid representation of an idea in sound. A word often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, colour, sound, smell, action, state or intensity".
While this paper is quite specific, I'm sure you can draw some inspiration from it. Now onto today's prompts:

• Does your language have ideophones? If so, how do they work?
  • How does the phonology of your language's ideophones work? Are there any phonotactic restrictions? Any marginal segments that only occur in these ideophones?
  • How do ideophones behave morphologically? Are they verb-like, adverb-like or noun-like? Do they contrast with other parts of speech? How are they distributed syntactically?
• Are there other ideophone-like words in your language, like e.g. onomatopoeia?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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Adjective Ordering Restrictions Revisited (Teodorescu)

Today's paper is about adjective ordering restrictions (henceforth AOR). This paper was submitted by one of our friendly overlords, namely, u/Slorany. AOR are, as their name suggests, restrictions on how adjectives are arranged when there are several describing a single head. While the paper is a bit technical, especially later on, the first couple of pages should be understandable, even to laymen. Now onto today's prompts:

• Does your language follow the ordering given in the hierarchy on page 2?
  • If not, are there other restrictions on adjective ordering that do not conform with the ones given in the paper?
  • Does your language distinguish different types of adjectives that are affected by different AOR?
• Did earlier stages of your language — if you considered diachronics while creating it — have different AOR than its modern version?
• A more general question: how do attributive adjectives (e.g. 'the black sheep', cf. predicative adjectives 'the sheep is black') work in your language?
  • How are they distinguished from predicative adjectives, if at all?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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The Evolution of Noun Incorporation (Mithun)

Today's paper is written by Mariannne Mithun, a linguist who we've already been introduced to in this activity's first edition! This paper is about noun incorporation, a morphosyntactic process in which the verb forms a compound with one or more of its arguments, while still retaining its initial syntactic function. This notion is heavily associated with polysynthetic languages, but polysynthesis does not directly imply the presence of noun incorporation. There are also other types of incorporation such as adverbial incorporation, and one-word serial verb constructions could probably also be analyzed as a type of incorporation. Now onto today's prompts:

• Does your language feature noun incorporation? Can adverbs or verbs be incorporated as well?
  • If so, how does it work? Does it fall into one of the types described by Mithun in her paper?
  • Why would a speaker of your language prefer an incorporated argument over a non-incorporated argument? As in, what are the motivations for noun incorporation?
• If you considered diachronics while creating your language, how did (noun) incorporation evolve? Are there any interesting grammaticalization or lexicalization processes going on?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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A typology of frustrative marking in Amazonian languages (Overall)

Today's TyPotW is all about frustratives. Frustratives are a cross-linguistic typological category which marks that an event happened 'in vain' or, to word it more scientifically, one which expresses the non-realization of some expected outcome implied by the proposition expressed in the marked clause. If you want to know more about this, check out the paper from above. Now onto today's prompts:

• Does your language have frustratives?
  • If so, how do they work? What's their semantic scope, i.e. what meanings do they cover?
• If you considered diachronics while constructing your language, how did the frustrative marker evolve?
• Are there other non-standard expressions used in your language that come close to frustratives?
• If your language doesn't have frustratives, how do you express contexts often marked by them?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!

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.

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Interrogative words: an exercise in lexical typology (Cysouw)

How do the languages of the world handle interrogative words? This paper was submitted by u/Anhilare, many thanks to them. Today's prompts are:

• How do interrogative words and interrogatives in general work in your conlang?
  • If it doesn't have interrogative words (e.g. an engelang that doesn't have wh-words), how do you form content questions?
• Which categories do these interrogative words represent?
• If your language was created with diachronics in mind, how did the interrogatives form? Any special unpredicted lexicalizations or grammaticalizations?
• Are there compound interrogative words that were derived from other, more basic wh-words?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

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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!