questions about a TAM system

[paa pəpaa]

Hello.
I was here for a brief period a couple of years ago, and disappeared from here and conlanging in general because of, well RL. Recently I've been wanting a little escape from RL, so I'm starting to a puzzle and tinker on certain ideas and thoughts that might or might not end up being a conlang.

So, (re)introduction taken care of, I now present to you my WIP TAM system. (fanfare!)


The following major TAM categories exist:



These categories combine in the following manner:



There will also be a set of secondary aspect particles to make finer distinctions. Verbal accents and conditioned nasals are copy paste of my old notes on Hihka (which I presented an early incarnation of here in like 2014) at this point and may or may not be subject to change. I really like the idea of grammatical pitch accent though, so that part will probably be pretty similar at least.


So, my questions to the good people of cbb are:
1. Does this system make sense?
2. Should there be different and/or additional meanings to some of the combinations? I’m particularly uncertain if non-present imperfective realis should be habitual past.
3. (just to feed my ego, really) ain’t this system pretty cool?

[zyma]

Hello.
I was here for a brief period a couple of years ago, and disappeared from here and conlanging in general because of, well RL. Recently I've been wanting a little escape from RL, so I'm starting to a puzzle and tinker on certain ideas and thoughts that might or might not end up being a conlang.

Hello, welcome back!

So, my questions to the good people of cbb are:
1. Does this system make sense?

I'd say so.

2. Should there be different and/or additional meanings to some of the combinations? I’m particularly uncertain if non-present imperfective realis should be habitual past.

I'm not sure, in all honestly. Could you tell us more about the existing combinations, perhaps?

3. (just to feed my ego, really) ain’t this system pretty cool?

In my opinion, yes!

[paa2000]

Thanks for your reply and re-welcome shimobataar! I appreciate it. I'll make some samples to show how it's supposed to work later.

Spoiler:

(in case any of you are wondering why I have a different screen name: I think I made a typo when I tried to change my email address to a more current one in the account settings (and stupidly copy pasted the err into the confirm email address field ), and didn't receive the reactivation email (sic). So I made a new account..)

For now, I have something else I'd like to share for questions and comments. I worked out some details of an accent system, and decided to present it in this post instead of cluttering Beginner's corner with different posts regarding the same language.. I'd change the name of this thread, but to do that I need access the original account..

Anyhow:

[X] employs a pitch/stress accent system of sorts. Tone is assigned by stress, and there are two kinds of stress: primary and secondary. All words of three syllables or more has at least one stressed syllable. The accents are differentiated by the placement of primary stress in the following manner: Accent I has ultimate primary stress, accent II has penultimate primary stress and accent III has no primary stress. There can only be two consecutive unstressed syllables, so if an accent III has three syllables, the first will be secondarily stressed. Primary stressed syllables are long, all other are short.

Almost all monosyllabic words are stressless, with only a handfull of grammatical particles employing stress and a spesific tone.

Verbals apply different accents according to aspect (Realis (A-I)/ Irrealis (A-II)) while nominals have lexical accent. Accent III is rare, and occurs only in borrowings and certain grammatical particles.

There are five level tones: Top (extra high) (T), High (H), Low (L), Creaky (low with creaky voice) (C) and Mid (M); and two contour tones: rising (MH) and falling (HL).

Primary stressed syllables have by default (see section on suprasegmental accents) a contour tone MH or HL or in verbals level tone T. In nominals, which contour tone is to be employed is determined by the difference in sonority between (1) the onset of the stressed syllable and (2) either the coda (or lack of coda in final syllables) or the onset of the following syllable. MH where (2) is higher on the sonority hierarchy and HL where (1) is the highest. In verbals, all primary stressed syllables are in Top tone.

Secondarily stressed syllables are by default either H or L, decided in the same manner as p.stressed; where H corresponds to p.stressed MH and L to HL. This goes for verbals as well as nominals.

Unstressed syllables are by default in M, with one exeption, the so called downstep: in the syllable immediately preceding a primary stressed MH, the tone is L.

The default assignment of tone is used in most utterances. This may change by assignment of suprasegmental accents, where in, for instance utterances expressing profound disbelief, all unstressed syllables have C, primary stressed have T and secondarily stressed have M. (This feature is very incomplete because I really have to sit down and consider what
I can and want to do. Input is appreciated!)

So, I now ask the same questions as in the OP (except for no. 2)

1. Does this system make sense?
2. Suggestions for improvements, and/or ideas for in which situations I can use other suprasegmental accents? I'd also like to see samples if some other members here have conlangs with pitch/stress accent.
3. (just to feed my ego, really) ain’t this system pretty cool?