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!

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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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

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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!