Typological Paper of the Week #39: Appositive possession in Ainu and around the Pacific

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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.

Appositive possession in Ainu and around the Pacific (Bugaeva, Nichols & Bickel)

This week's paper was again submitted by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate and presents a survey of appositive possession in Ainu, a language isolate spoken on the northern Japanese island Hokkaido, as well as in several other languages around the pacific. This week's TyPoW is going to be less specific again; thus you'll be able to talk about the general functioning on possessive constructions in your language! Nevertheless, there are some prompts to guide you:

  • How does possession work in your language?
    • Is there dedicated morphology to mark possession on nouns?
    • Are there semantic or pragmatic distinctions between different possessive constructions, if there are more than one?
    • Is there an alienability (or an inherent/non-inherent, possessable/unpossessable) contrast?
  • If you considered diachronics while creating your language, how did possessive constructions 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 #38: Demonstratives — A cross-linguistic typology

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.

Demonstratives: A cross-linguistic typology (Dixon)

This week's paper was again submitted by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate and presents a cross-linguistic typology of demonstratives. It primarily distinguishes three main types of demonstratives: nominal, local adverbial and verbal. It then surveys their basic properties: forms, functions and types of reference. More on that can be found if you click on the link above. Dixon defines a demonstrative as "a grammatical word (or, occasionally, a clitic or affix) which can have pointing (or deictic) reference;" Now, let's move unto the prompts:

  • What are the morphosyntactic properties of demonstratives in your language, if they exist at all?
    • How are the three main types proposed by the paper included, if at all?
    • Is there any syncretism or polysemy with regards to the forms of demonstratives?
  • Do the demonstratives in your language exhibit any characteristics that are not included in the prototypical definition of demonstratives?

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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 #37: Pluractionality — A cross-linguistic 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.

Pluractionality: A cross-linguistic perspective (Mattiola)

This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/PyrolatrousCoagulate and presents a cross-linguistic perspective of pluractionality. Mattiola defines pluractionality as being a "morphological modification of the verb or a pair of semantically related verbs that primarily convey a plurality of situations involving a repetition in time, space, and/or participants (Mattiola, 2019, p. 164)." Moreover, the paper distinguishes pluractionality as a subtype of verbal number; the latter may be encoded through any linguistic means (e.g., adverbs), whereas pluractionality refers to the encoding of these semantics by direct morphological modification on the verb. An alternative definition can be found on Wikipedia: "[it] is a grammatical device that indicates that the action or participants of a verb is/are plural." Now onto the prompts:

  • Are verbs marked for pluractionality in your language?
    • If not, what are other means to express verbal number?
    • What other functions do these markers encode — besides pluractionality? (e.g., habituality, continuativity)
    • How do pluractional markers behave morphosyntactically?
    • Are there any interesting interactions between pluractional markers and other morphemes?

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

Tryddle’s Conlanging Class: Lesson 3

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Hey all,

on Tuesday the third lesson of my conlanging class took place. We discussed non-pulmonic consonants and other consonants that are not included on the IPA chart. Then we went through the most important diacritical marks, and as this took quite a while, we didn't have that much time left. After briefly talking about suprasegmentals (incl. intonation and tone), I presented the difference between orthography and romanisation based on examples from Japanese and Russian.

I hope we'll finish the phonology lesson next time; what's left is just the difference between phoneme and phone, and while that will take a while to explain, I'm already excited for the unit after that: morphology!

See you in two weeks!
Fiat Lingua!

Typological Paper of the Week #36: Anticircumstantial clauses across 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.

Anticircumstantial clauses across languages (Mauri & Sansò)

This week's paper provides a first typology of so-called anticircumstantial clauses. It defines anticircumstantial clauses (ACs) as "the negative counterpart of circumstantial clauses". The main types of AC the paper presents are negated temporal clauses ("People lost in the wild have survived for long periods without eating"), negated conditional clauses and negated reason clauses. In this TyPoW you will be able to share with us how to encode ACs in your language! Now onto the prompts:

  • How are ACs expressed in your language?
    • Is there a relation to the nominal domain? (E.g. syncretism with privative cases)
    • What morphosyntactic properties do ACs have in your language (cf. page 3 in the paper)
    • Are there any restrictions on different subjects?
    • What semantic distinctions are exhibited by AC 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 #35: A typology of demonstrative clause linkers

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 typology of demonstrative clause linkers (Diessel & Breunesse)

This week's paper talks about how demonstratives (e.g. "thus", "therefore", or "that") can grammaticalize into marking different kinds of clause linkage. It specifically focusses on (i) relative pronouns, (ii) linking and nominalising articles, (iii) quotative markers, (iv) complementisers, (v) conjunctive adverbs, (vi) adverbial subordinate conjunctions, (vii) correlatives and (viii) topic markers. Now onto the prompts:

  • Have demonstratives grammaticalized to function non-prototypically in your language?
    • Do they exhibit any of the functions listed above and in the paper?
    • Do they work differently?
  • What role do demonstratives play in general?
  • How does your language express the contexts listed above, if not with demonstratives?

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 #34: Savosavo Kinship Terminology — Social Context and Linguistic Features

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.

Savosavo Kinship Terminology: Social Context and Linguistic Features

This week's paper is on kinship terminology in the Papuan language Savosavo, which is remarkable as it covers fifteen generations; a rare feature, cross-linguistically. In this week's TyPoW you can talk about your own language's kinship system. Anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan identified six basic patterns of kinship terminologies, which are listed here. Even though those are the six underlying structures that have been observed in natural languages so far, each language may modify that basis, yielding distinct results. There are also some funky elements like the so-called dual propositus tri-relational kinship terms, found in some Australian Aboriginal languages. You can read more about them on the aforementioned wikipedia page. Now onto the prompts:

  • How does your language handle kinship terms?
    • Which basic pattern (see above) does your conlang exhibit? Or is it impossible to categorize it like that?
    • How do kinship terms interact with other cultural elements? (e.g. taboos)
  • How are kinship terms used in discourse?

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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 #33: Focused assertion of identity — A typology of intensifiers

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.

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?)

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

Tryddle’s Conlanging Class: Lessons 1 & 2

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Hey there!

In this new series on my website I'll inform you guys about the state of the conlanging class I'm teaching at my institution. I had one lesson on September 28th, but I forgot to make that first post, so now, after the second lesson took place yesterday, I have decided to write this short post.

In the first lesson we didn't do that much, just some organizational stuff and a bunch of definitions. We discussed the difference between a priori and a posteriori conlangs, famous conlangs and conlangers and some common terms like "kitchen sink" or "relex". I should note that I'm basing my class's curriculum on the Conlangs University project that some of my friends organized. At last I gave the students some useful wikipedia links they could check out to get some first introduction to linguistics.

In the second lesson yesterday we discussed the basics of phonology, i.e. the difference between phonetics and phonology, the IPA, consonant PoA and MoA, as well as the basics of the vowel chart.

This was my report for the first two lessons, see you next time!

Fiat Lingua!

Typological Paper of the Week #32: Exploring Clause Chaining

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.

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?

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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!