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

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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.

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?

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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!

Typological Paper of the Week #13: Damn your eyes! (Not really) Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands

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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.

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

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 #12: Evidentiality in Boran and Witotoan languages

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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.

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

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 #11: The Blue Bird of Ergativity

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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.

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

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 #10: Tense But in the Mood – Diachronic Perspectives on the Representation of Time in Ao

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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.

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

Submit your papers here!

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

1470th Just Used 5 Minutes of Your Day

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Hapi

tàahoih pihi hasáa-h=tài sáá-h=kóa tóixia-soa

1 girl be.best-1=DEM eat-1=DECL maracuya-PL

‘I, the best girl, am eating (some) maracuyas.’

Notes

  • A demonstrative may be suffixed to a finite verb to form relative clauses.
  • The Hapi can't read and aren't familiar with the concept of books, so I changed the sentence so that it would be realistic for a native speaker of Hapi to utter it like that.
  • ...

1469th Just Used 5 Minutes of Your Day

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Hapi

tóíha-aí títo-a=í hoi-a=ká=xa koí-haí

news-NEXT.TO hear-2/3=S/A>S(SE) be.at-2/3=DECL=CONT hut-NEXT.TO

‘Listening to the news, he is standing outside of his hut.’

Notes

  • The Hapi people know neither of balconies nor of newspapers, so I had to change some words: 'reading the newspaper' became 'listening to the news [someone else is telling]' and 'on the balcony' became 'outside of [his] hut'.
  • there's some differential argument marking happening with the O of títo 'to hear'; you'd usually expect tóíha to be in the unmarked absolutive case, but since it's a stimulus and concerns sensory perception, it takes the 'next to' relational case instead.
  • ...

1468th Just Used 5 Minutes of Your Day

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Hapi

kíso-soa háhíí-h a-kaai-hi-áh=kóa

cheese-PL accidentally-TRANS PASS-be.bad-INT.PAST-CAUS-DECL

‘The cheeses have deteriorated.’

Notes

  • I have returned!
  • the adverbal háhíí marks an action as being performed 'accidentally', but may also express that an action has 'happened just like that', without external influence. Like all adverbals, háhíí takes a transitivity agreement suffix, in this case, -h.
  • the verbal morphology of our VP head here is quite funky. In this example, the verb stem takes both the causative and the passive affixes. Since in most cases, the passive can only be marked on a transitive verb, the causative's semantics are applied first. kaai 'to be bad', kaai-[...]-áh 'to make bad', a-kaai-[...]-áh 'to be made bad'.
  • ...

Typological Paper of the Week #9: Typology of Generic-Person Marking in Tshobdun Rgyalrong

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.

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

Submit your papers here!

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

General Information

tryddle

On this page I will upload posts of various sorts, all relating to conlanging. As of now, you will find the following two types of posts here:
'Just Used 5 Minutes of Your Day' posts; this subreddit activity (henceforth abbreviated as 5MOYD) challenges the user to translate a sentence of variable complexity. While I try to translate and post every 5MOYD, I sometimes take larger breaks from conlanging itself. In these breaks, I usually don't do any translations, although I might post some older 5MOYDS in other languages here.
'Typological Paper of the Week' posts; this is my own activity on the subreddit, and I will post these every Saturday, here and on the subreddit. In this challenge I present a typological paper which might be interesting to your conlanging, because it may cover topics you haven't really thought about yet.

Note that I sometimes lack the time to write these posts simultaneously to when they're posted on reddit. However, if that's the case, I try to upload these retroactively. So you might see a 5MOYD pop up several days after I actually posted it on reddit.