A while back the Segments team announced the release of the third issue of the eponymous journal, and one of the articles is written by me! It talks about some aspects of nominal morphosyntax in my Carib a posteriori Pigáxio. You can find a link to the pdf of this issue here, my article is on page 83.
Until next time, stay safe 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.
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:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
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.
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:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
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.
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:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
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.
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:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
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.
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:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
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.
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:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
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.
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:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
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.
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:
(You can also check out a recent Conlangery episode on the topic here)
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
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.
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:
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!