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.

---

Spatial Prefixes in Dargi (van den Berg)

Today's paper is about spatial prefixes in the East Caucasian language Dargi. While this might seem like a very narrow and specific topic, I'm sure there's alot to talk about. Now onto the prompts:

• How does your language handle spatial deictics?
  • Are deictics marked on the verb as in Dargi, or does your language use adverbs or relational cases?
  • What semantics are covered by these morphemes? Are there exceptions concerning the encoding of these semantics?
• Are there any lexicalized expressions or idioms using the morphemes encoding spatial deictics?
• If you considered diachronic processes like sound change or grammaticalization while creating your conlang, how did the spatial markers arise?

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.

---

Coordinating Constructions: An Overview (Haspelmath)

Today's topic is coordinating constructions. These are constructions in which two coonstituents are linked together and have the same status; an example for coordinating constructions in English would be 'my dog and my cat'. While this might seem very boring at first, there are many typological properties that coordinating constructions can exhibit. More on that in the paper! Now for today's prompts:

• How does your language handle coordination? How does it work?
  • Does your language exhibit asyndetic, monosyndetic or bisyndetic constructions?
  • What semantics are covered by syndesis in your conlang?
• If your language doesn't have coordination at all, how do you express the meaning typically conveyed by coordinating constructions?
• Are conjunctions in your language category-sensitive? Is there any syncretism with * respect to those conjunctions?
• Do your language's conjunctions exhibit polysemy, ie. have got some more usages and meanings than a simple coordinating semantics?
• And finally, are there any syntactic processes like extraction or ellipsis that affect the function of conjunctions in your languages?

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 I bring with me a new activity called the Typological Paper of the Week. In this weekly activity, I will present a linguistic paper that could be useful to your conlanging process. Additionally, I will present a few prompts to spark discussion in the comments. There will also be the possibility for you (yes, you!) to submit a paper that you find cool/have read recently/seems useful to conlanging itself in the form below. I've talked enough now, let's move on to today's paper:

---

Understanding and explaining applicatives (Mithun)

Today's topic is all about applicatives. Now you may ask, 'but what are applicatives?'. Applicatives are derivational processes which add an oblique non-core argument to the set of core arguments. Don't get it? Read the paper, and thou shalt be enlightened. As promised, now for today's prompt:

• Does your language have applicatives?

  • If not, what are some other valency-modifying processes?

  • If yes, how do they behave, what do they do? Are there any constraints on what they can't do? What kind of applicatives are there? (e.g. benefactives, instrumental, directional)

• Does your language have other means of expressing the categories that could be marked by applicatives?

---

Submit your papers here!

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