Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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Czwartek
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by Czwartek »

Micamo wrote:Lemme get this straight: You want modifiers to be completely syntactically free from their heads, yet make the system have no ambiguity as to what dependent goes to which head?
Precisely. My main problem is how to conveniently implement such a system morphologically and phonetically.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by Micamo »

First of all I have to question why such syntactic freedom is even desirable.

Secondly, you could have a procedural system that turns numbers into strings of phonemes, then attach a unique number to every constitutent of the clause. A dependent would then agree with the number of its head.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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Micamo wrote:First of all I have to question why such syntactic freedom is even desirable.
It's not no much the syntactic freedom I'm after, but the ability to express distinctions in meaning that English can't, or isn't as inclined to do.
Micamo wrote:Secondly, you could have a procedural system that turns numbers into strings of phonemes, then attach a unique number to every constitutent of the clause. A dependent would then agree with the number of its head.
I've considered that, but it would likely sound very repetitive with every sentence containing the same few referential affixes.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by Micamo »

Czwartek wrote:It's not no much the syntactic freedom I'm after, but the ability to express distinctions in meaning that English can't, or isn't as inclined to do.
What distinctions does your system have that syntactically-bound systems can't do?
I've considered that, but it would likely sound very repetitive with every sentence containing the same few referential affixes.
Who says you need to pick the same numbers every time?
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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Micamo wrote:What distinctions does your system have that syntactically-bound systems can't do?
How about verbs where the subject and object are in two different locations? I wrote a letter to a friend in prison most likely means that the friend is in prison, but how would you refer to yourself as the one in prison? 'While in prison, I wrote a letter to my friend' could work, though it still leaves a degree of ambiguity, and requires an extra word and comma. It also needlessly implies that the speaker is no longer in prison. 'In prison I wrote a letter to my friend' is the best version I can think of, but it still sounds highly formal and unnatural.
Micamo wrote:Who says you need to pick the same numbers every time?
How would you decide which to use? I don't like the idea of the speaker just choosing reference affixes randomly.

I feel I should thank you for taking time to entertain and give suggestions to this seemingly crazy idea of mine. ;-)
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by Micamo »

Czwartek wrote:How about verbs where the subject and object are in two different locations? I wrote a letter to a friend in prison most likely means that the friend is in prison, but how would you refer to yourself as the one in prison?
The difficulty is the adpositional phrase modifying the clause vs. modifying the object, and this confusion is quite limited to English. There are easy syntactic means to resolve the ambiguity without resorting to agreement markers. For example, having the adpositional adverbials come before their heads.

And I would just pick them randomly.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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Czwartek wrote:
Micamo wrote:Lemme get this straight: You want modifiers to be completely syntactically free from their heads, yet make the system have no ambiguity as to what dependent goes to which head?
Precisely. My main problem is how to conveniently implement such a system morphologically and phonetically.
It's only a problem if a sentence can contain two or more head-dependent relationships of the same type.

If your sentences are so simple that, for instance, they can't contain more than one verb, and at most one noun, and at most one adjective, and at most one adverb, and at most one adposition -- and so on -- then you'll always know what goes with what.

____________________________________________________________________

Let's assume you're not wanting to be that simple.

Then, you can use, either syntax, or morphology, or lexical choice, or some combination.

If you use pure syntax, that pretty-much means pure word-order; so heads and dependents will have to be syntactically-bound, as I think you mean it.

____________________________________________________________________

If you eschew syntax completely, you're left with some combination of morphology and lexical choice.
Edit: No natlang accomplishes this by employing lexical choice exclusively; but let's suppose a conlang did.
Suppose every noun or pronoun had a paradigm (i.e. a declension) in which every "cell" was suppletive. That is, for instance, the nominative, accusative, and dative forms of any noun or pronoun that had them, wouldn't appear to have similar roots at all. Nor would the singular and plural. Nor the definite and indefinite. And they'd all be suppletive for person.

Suppose that every adjective agreed with the case, definiteness, gender, number, person, and referentiality/specificity, of the noun or pronoun it modified -- but always through suppletion, never derivation nor inflection.

Suppose that every adverb that could modify both a verb and an adjective, or both a verb and an adverb, or both an adjective and an adverb, had suppletively different forms depending on what part-of-speech it was modifying. It could also agree, suppletively, with the "gender" or class of verb or adjective or adverb it was modifying.

You could also make the noun modified by an adjective agree, suppletively, with the degree-of-comparison (positive, equative/simulative, comparative, or superlative) of its adjective; or make the adjective or verb or adverb modified by an adverb agree, suppletively, with the degree-of-comparison of its modifying adverb.

And you could make the verb agree, suppletively, with the definiteness, gender, number, person, and/or referentiality/specificity of each of its core participants (e.g. subject; or subject and object; or subject, direct object, and indirect object).

You could make the nouns-or-pronouns-or-phrases that were these participants agree with one or more of the aspect, evidentiality, mirativity, modality/mode/mood, polarity, tense, validationality, and voice, of their verb. (I think each one of aspect and polarity and tense is in fact attested, each in a separate natlang, for at least one core participant.) And you could make that agreement suppletive, rather than inflectional or derivational; that is not attested in any natlang AFAIK, and I doubt it ever will be.

____________________________________________________________________

If you don't rely exclusively, nor even mainly, on lexical choice; and you don't want to rely at all on syntax; then almost all of the burden of deciding which head goes with which dependent, will be borne by agreement morphology.

____________________________________________________________________

One way you could accomplish this without having any of the heads agree with any of their dependents, and without having any of the dependents agree with any of their heads, would be to have all floating markers.

Floating markers are certainly attested in natlangs. I don't know if there are any natlangs that rely exclusively on floating markers. IIRC there are some that rely mainly on floating markers, but they're very much a small minority type.

For each kind of head-dependent relationship, have a root word that stands for that kind of relationship. Then, for each head-dependent relationship in your sentence, select a "floating marker" whose root denotes that type of relationship, then mark it both with semantic and/or syntactic information about the head (make it agree with its head), and also mark it with semantic and/or syntactic information about the dependent.

Even if the head, the dependent, and the marker, get widely separated from each other and get scrambled into any order, there's a good chance the addressee can still tell what goes with what.
If the sentence contains two or more heads which are alike in all ways the floating marker agrees with heads, and/or contains two or more dependents which are alike in all ways the floating marker agrees with dependents, then some ambiguity will result.
How hard it would be for the addressee to disambiguate will depend; in many instances it might not be difficult at all.

____________________________________________________________________

IMO free word-order is freest and easiest with double-or-triple marking.

If every head agrees with every dependent and every dependent agrees with its head;
or every head agrees with every dependent and every head-dependent relationship is marked with a floating marker;
or every dependent agrees with its head and every head-dependent relationship is marked with a floating marker;
then that's called "double-marking".

Do you want never to have to mark the dependents to agree with their head?

If you use head-marking and floating markers, then IMO you can probably accomplish truly free word-order without any dependent-marking at all; dependents need never agree with their heads.

Do you want never to have to mark the head to agree with its dependents?

If you use dependent-marking and floating markers, then IMO you can probably accomplish truly free word-order without any head-marking at all; heads need never agree with any of their dependents.

____________________________________________________________________

If you both head-mark and dependent-mark every head-dependent relationship, "truly" free word-order is IMO easy. In every head-dependent relationship, both the head and the dependent will be marked to show what type of relationship they're in, and each will be marked with some semantic and/or syntactic information about the other.

The only ambiguous situations would be, if the sentence contains two head-dependent relationships of the same type, where both dependents could be agreeing with either head, and both heads could be agreeing with either dependent.

____________________________________________________________________

(Note that a word can be the dependent in at most one head-dependent relationship at a time. But, a word can be the head-word in several simultaneous head-dependent relationships, as long as no two of them are of the same kind. Also, the dependent-word in one head-dependent relationship could easily be the head-word in one or several others; and one of them could even be the same kind, as in "Jane's dog's toy". That's why it's necessary for the type of relationship to be part of head-marking.)

____________________________________________________________________

Does any of that help?


________________________________________________

I think one of the things you're wondering how to show is "scope". That is, if a modifier could be modifying one word, or could be modifying a small piece (that contains that word) of the sentence, or could be modifying a large piece that contains the small piece, or could be modifying the whole sentence --- how do you tell which it is doing?

The easiest way to solve that is to make the modifier come in two parts, one of which goes just before its scope begins and the other goes just after its scope ends. Like French's "ne ... pas" used to be.

In programming languages, and also in natlangs, that strategy is sometimes used.
But more commonly, for any particular modifier-word, either it's lexically inherent in the modifier-word that its scope is as short as possible, or it's lexically inherent that its scope is as long as possible.

Also, commonly, all modifiers have to come next to their "modifiee".
And, commonly, for each language that has them, either all long-scope modifiers come just before their scope, or all long-scope modifiers come just after their scope; the opposite boundary of the scope ends just before the next such modifier or just after the previous such modifier, respectively.

I know you don't want modifiers to be syntactically bound to their "modifiees", so those last two sentences are strategies you'll try to get along without.

____________________________________________________________________

Does any of that help?



____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________


Czwartek wrote:How about verbs where the subject and object are in two different locations? I wrote a letter to a friend in prison most likely means that the friend is in prison, but how would you refer to yourself as the one in prison? 'While in prison, I wrote a letter to my friend' could work, though it still leaves a degree of ambiguity, and requires an extra word and comma. It also needlessly implies that the speaker is no longer in prison. 'In prison I wrote a letter to my friend' is the best version I can think of, but it still sounds highly formal and unnatural.
"I wrote a letter to a friend from prison" is the most natural.
It makes it clear that the friend isn't in prison.
It's still ambiguous, though; possibly the writer was in prison when s/he wrote the letter, or possibly the friendship was made while both the writer and the friend were incarcerated.

I wrote a letter to a friend in prison most likely means that the friend is in prison
as you said.


Why does
'While in prison, I wrote a letter to my friend' could work, though it still leaves a degree of ambiguity,
have any ambiguity at all? It's "stilted" perhaps, but not ambiguous.

It also needlessly implies that the speaker is no longer in prison.
What?!? No it doesn't!

'In prison I wrote a letter to my friend' is the best version I can think of, but it still sounds highly formal and unnatural.
I don't think it's formal at all.
I don't think it's remarkably unnatural either.
But I do think I wrote a letter to a friend from prison is more natural.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by eldin raigmore »

roninbodhisattva wrote:Bullet points for an idea I just had:

Verbs are lexically classified as having or not having duration (lexical aspect). Those verbs that do have duration must appear with an auxiliary, to which any kind of TAM inflection attaches. The auxiliary classifies the subject based on the position/shape of the object; they originate from grammaticalized positional verbs 'sit', 'lie', 'stand'. For motion verbs, there is a general motion auxiliary (maybe gets compounded with a positional one in some cases).
Kinda cool, IMO.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by Czwartek »

Eldin Raigmore, please forgive my ignorance of advanced grammatical terminology, but I understood about 20% of everything you wrote before the green line.
eldin raigmore wrote:Why does
'While in prison, I wrote a letter to my friend' could work, though it still leaves a degree of ambiguity,
have any ambiguity at all? It's "stilted" perhaps, but not ambiguous.
It doesn't indicate who's the one in prison. More complete versions would be 'While I was in prison ...' or 'While he/she was in prison ...'
eldin raigmore wrote:
It also needlessly implies that the speaker is no longer in prison.
What?!? No it doesn't!
The word 'while', as with 'when', when referring to the past, implies that the period referred to is over. You'd never say 'While/when in prison I wrote a letter to my friend' if you were still in prison, and you'd never hear a child say 'While/when I was a child I believed in Santa Clause'.
eldin raigmore wrote:
'In prison I wrote a letter to my friend' is the best version I can think of, but it still sounds highly formal and unnatural.
I don't think it's formal at all.
I don't think it's remarkably unnatural either.
But I do think I wrote a letter to a friend from prison is more natural.
Maybe 'In prison I wrote a letter to my friend' is the best way to say it. To me, 'I wrote a letter to my friend from prison' is the most ambiguous since, as you said, it could refer to somebody you became acquainted with while you were both in prison. It could also refer to somebody who simply has something to do with prison in their past or present life, as you'd say 'my friend from Spain' to refer to someone who was either born or grew up in Spain, or somebody who was simply in Spain at the same time you were.

==============================================================================

I don't know if you covered this already. Apologies if you did and I simply didn't understand. An idea I had last night is to turn all modifying phrases into adjectives, which inflect for case/gender/number or whatever else is needed to unambiguously associate it with the noun or pronoun it modifies. As in English you can rewrite the original prison sentence as 'I wrote a letter to my imprisoned friend', with 'imprisoned' being an adjective describing the state of being incarcerated, or 'in prison'. I don't know if any natlangs do this, but it would be quite simple to replace all prepositions with case inflections, and have a common adjective-marking inflection which occurs between the case/gender/number of its host noun and the the case/gender/number of its modifying noun. For example 'see.PST.1st table.UND.ADJ.ACC child.ACC' where UND is a case replacing the preposition 'under', and ADJ is the inflection converting the word into an adjective. So it becomes 'I saw the under-table child' or 'I saw the child under the table'.

You could also inflect verbs as adjectives in phrases to replace relative clauses. 'I wrote to the candidate who enjoys fishing' could be written as 'write.PST.1st enjoy.3rd.ADJ.DAT fishing.ACC.ADJ.DAT candidate.DAT' or 'I wrote to the fishing-enjoying candidate'.

Any thoughts?
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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eldin raigmore wrote:I think one of the things you're wondering how to show is "scope". That is, if a modifier could be modifying one word, or could be modifying a small piece (that contains that word) of the sentence, or could be modifying a large piece that contains the small piece, or could be modifying the whole sentence --- how do you tell which it is doing?
I haven't read your whole post yet (fascinating and incredibly enlightening as always, btw), I just wanted to ask this question right away: Would it be possible for scope to be marked as an inflectional category of the dependents? What kind of behaviors are in natlangs that do this?
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by Czwartek »

Micamo wrote:(fascinating and incredibly enlightening as always, btw)
Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a conlanger (or maybe it's too late at night, lol).
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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Czwartek wrote:Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a conlanger (or maybe it's too late at night, lol).
No shame in not knowing the terms: Feel free to ask questions and take everything in one bit at a time. Heck my linguistic vocabulary doubles every time Eldin posts.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by eldin raigmore »

Czwartek wrote:Eldin Raigmore, please forgive my ignorance of advanced grammatical terminology, but I understood about 20% of everything you wrote before the green line.
I hope you'll look up what you didn't understand, or ask about it, and try again.

Czwartek wrote:It doesn't indicate who's the one in prison. More complete versions would be 'While I was in prison ...' or 'While he/she was in prison ...'
Not the way English works; "While in prison I wrote ..." can only mean that the writing, done by me, took place while I was in prison. The subject/agent of "wrote" has to be the one who was in prison.

Czwartek wrote:The word 'while', as with 'when', when referring to the past, implies defeasibly implicates that the period referred to is over.
The implicature is defeasible.

Czwartek wrote:You'd never be unlikely to say 'While/when in prison I wrote a letter to my friend' if you were still in prison, and you'd never be unlikely to hear a child say 'While/when I was a child I believed in Santa Clause'.
Those sayings are unlikely under those circumstances, so the implicature exists. But they're not impossible (for instance they might be said to clarify a previous utterance at the request of one who didn't quite understand it). Therefore the implicature is defeasible.

Czwartek wrote:Maybe 'In prison I wrote a letter to my friend' is the best way to say it. To me, 'I wrote a letter to my friend from prison' is the most ambiguous since, as you said, it could refer to somebody you became acquainted with while you were both in prison. It could also refer to somebody who simply has something to do with prison in their past or present life, as you'd say 'my friend from Spain' to refer to someone who was either born or grew up in Spain, or somebody who was simply in Spain at the same time you were.
It is indeed ambiguous, in all the ways you said. But I don't think it's been shown that it's the "most" ambiguous.

Czwartek wrote:I don't know if you covered this already. Apologies if you did and I simply didn't understand. An idea I had last night is to turn all modifying phrases into adjectives, which inflect for case/gender/number or whatever else is needed to unambiguously associate it with the noun or pronoun it modifies. As in English you can rewrite the original prison sentence as 'I wrote a letter to my imprisoned friend', with 'imprisoned' being an adjective describing the state of being incarcerated, or 'in prison'. I don't know if any natlangs do this, but it would be quite simple to replace all prepositions with case inflections, and have a common adjective-marking inflection which occurs between the case/gender/number of its host noun and the the case/gender/number of its modifying noun. For example 'see.PST.1st table.UND.ADJ.ACC child.ACC' where UND is a case replacing the preposition 'under', and ADJ is the inflection converting the word into an adjective. So it becomes 'I saw the under-table child' or 'I saw the child under the table'.
For all I know that's possible; maybe there's even a natlang that does that, for all I know.
IMO the only way to find out if it's possible is to either try it in a conlang and see, or find a natlang that already does it.

Czwartek wrote:You could also inflect verbs as adjectives in phrases to replace relative clauses. 'I wrote to the candidate who enjoys fishing' could be written as 'write.PST.1st enjoy.3rd.ADJ.DAT fishing.ACC.ADJ.DAT candidate.DAT' or 'I wrote to the fishing-enjoying candidate'.
Lots of things said via adjectives in some languages are said via verbs in others.

There are languages without adjectives, where most things said via adjectives in other languages, are said via verbs instead.

It's also possible for the nuclear verbs of relative clauses to usually be participles rather than finite verbs.

Participles are already verbal adjectives.

It looks like your example is using an active participle (which in English is homophonous with an imperfective participle and with a present participle and with a gerund).

That is, your "enjoy.3rd.ADJ.DAT" is an active participle.

I think the ".DAT" part of the gloss must be because it modifies the dative noun "candidate.DAT"; that person could, depending on the language (English is one such), be the agent, instead of the recipient, of the enjoying.

That's why "enjoying" is an active participle instead of a passive participle; if it were a passive participle you'd have said "enjoyed".

On the ZBB and on the CONLANG-L mailinglist, there is a conlanger who's trying to make construct a conlang in which all "adpositional" ideas are expressed via verbs and subordinate (i.e. relative and/or adjunct) clauses.

I think he might pull it off; and I think you might succeed at your design goals too.

Micamo wrote:I haven't read your whole post yet (fascinating and incredibly enlightening as always, btw), I just wanted to ask this question right away: Would it be possible for scope to be marked as an inflectional category of the dependents? What kind of behaviors are in natlangs that do this?
(1) I don't know. It's conceivable. The only ways I can think of to find out, are to either try it in a conlang and see, or find a natlang that does it.

(2) I don't know. I kind of wish I did.
Apparently neither WALS.info nor the SIL Glossary nor Wikipedia have anything on it.
If you post that question on CONLANG ( conlang@listserv.brown.edu ) and/or on the ZBB, maybe someone will have an answer.

Micamo wrote:
Czwartek wrote:Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a conlanger (or maybe it's too late at night, lol).
No shame in not knowing the terms: Feel free to ask questions and take everything in one bit at a time.
What Micamo said.

And, remember, what your language does is more important than what words you use to describe it.

Don't let not knowing some term slow you down in developing your conlang.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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Teeheehee, I've come up with a crazy tense system! This only handles non-present tenses, by the way.

Every tense is composed of three parts: Frame, Direction, and Distance.

Frame is each of the 7 days of the week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. We'll call them 0-6.

Direction is whether we're referring to the future or to the past. We'll call the past direction 0 and the future direction 1.

Distance is the number of complete cycles through the frames we have made through the specified direction. We'll have 0, 1, and indicate more than 1 with 2.

This gives us 42 affixes in total to represent a large number of distinctions. {0,0,0} means "last sunday", {2,1,1} means "Not next tuesday but the one after that."
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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Micamo wrote:Teeheehee, I've come up with a crazy tense system! This only handles non-present tenses, by the way.

Every tense is composed of three parts: Frame, Direction, and Distance.

Frame is each of the 7 days of the week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. We'll call them 0-6.

Direction is whether we're referring to the future or to the past. We'll call the past direction 0 and the future direction 1.

Distance is the number of complete cycles through the frames we have made through the specified direction. We'll have 0, 1, and indicate more than 1 with 2.

This gives us 42 affixes in total to represent a large number of distinctions. {0,0,0} means "last sunday", {2,1,1} means "Not next tuesday but the one after that."
For the "Frame", I'm thinking that that might be different depending on the culture and the calendar they're using, which might be for some nice variation. Like the pre-modern Chinese had a 10 day week (same with Ancient Egyptians), and I'm pretty sure the MesoAmerican civs had a pretty fucked up system too (well, their calendar is pretty fucked up anyways)... Speaking of that, I'm pretty sure you can make up a pretty fucked up tense system using the MesoAmerican calendars, then.

But as for me, I'll keep with my very boring and simple past/present/future distinction. :-s
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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cybrxkhan wrote:For the "Frame", I'm thinking that that might be different depending on the culture and the calendar they're using, which might be for some nice variation. Like the pre-modern Chinese had a 10 day week (same with Ancient Egyptians), and I'm pretty sure the MesoAmerican civs had a pretty fucked up system too (well, their calendar is pretty fucked up anyways)... Speaking of that, I'm pretty sure you can make up a pretty fucked up tense system using the MesoAmerican calendars, then.
You can easily have any distinctions within Frame and Distance you want. More realistically, I would use [Morning, Day, Evening, Night] for my Frame.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

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Over the past couple of weeks I've been considering a new conlang I've been internally calling "secretlang." Why? Because I have absolutely no idea what to do with it phonologically so I can't come up with a con-name that will stick. But enough of that...

Dependency

The most important aspect of Secretlang is the relationship between a head and its dependent. The head of a phrase never takes any markings as to its properties and instead pushes all of these onto agreement markers carried by the dependent. The main consequence of this is that a phrase must always contain at least 2 words: Verb phrases require at least a Subject, Noun phrases require at least an Article, and Adpositional phrases must always have a dependent noun phrase. All of these things may be moved away from their heads but they may never be absent.

In the case of recursive phrase structure, the head of the dependent phrase always carries the agreement information of the head phrase. This information is not "pushed" down the stack multiple times.

Another major consequence: TAM is marked on nouns, not verbs, while nouns carry no information about their gender, number, and specificity and all of this information is carried on the article instead.
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by roninbodhisattva »

Micamo wrote:Another major consequence: TAM is marked on nouns, not verbs, while nouns carry no information about their gender, number, and specificity and all of this information is carried on the article instead.
Why wouldn't tam just get marked on a separate morpheme/auxiliary or something? Why is it a consequence that it's marked on the nouns?
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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by Micamo »

roninbodhisattva wrote:Why wouldn't tam just get marked on a separate morpheme/auxiliary or something? Why is it a consequence that it's marked on the nouns?
I considered that option but for consistency's sake I decided not to use auxiliaries in Secretlang. Instead, the direct arguments of a verb are its subject and object.

Why? Because:

1. I want secretlang to have cases, and I'm using the paradigm of "case-as-agreement" to implement this. Combined with...

2. My direct dependency rule. The markers of a head are pushed directly onto a dependent and no further. A noun cannot push its agreement information with an adposition onto an adjective, for example.

If I mark TAM with auxiliaries then I have to at least partially abandon one of the above 2 ideas. Why would nouns take case as to agree with their head verb? Why would these markers not just be taken by the auxiliary?
My pronouns are <xe> [ziː] / <xym> [zɪm] / <xys> [zɪz]

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Re: Random ideas: Morphosyntax

Post by Mbwa »

Czwartek wrote:
Micamo wrote:(fascinating and incredibly enlightening as always, btw)
Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a conlanger (or maybe it's too late at night, lol).
You need to cut yourself out.
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