A Sketch of a New Language

[Accept Knot]

Wow, it’s been almost a decade since I last posted!

I’ve wanted to get into conlanging for a long time, but I’ve never really gotten very far. Now is as good a time as any to start sitting down and actually banging one out. So here goes, another Unnamed Language Sketch

Overview:
This will be an SVO, agglutinative language. Verbs will infect for person/number, aspect, and several other categories.

Intransitive Predication:
This language uses what Stassen in “Intransitive Predication” (1997) calls Pattern 8: action and property predication both use a verbal strategy, whereas nominal predication uses a nominal strategy (probably juxtaposition) and locational predication uses a locational “support verb” strategy:

Paul 3sg-walk
"Paul walks"

Paul 3sg-tall-CLF
"Paul is tall"

Paul man
"Paul is a man"

Paul 3sg-be at house
"Paul is at the house"

So, when it comes to predication, adjectives (words that express core property concepts) and verbs are treated the same way. However, a distinct word class of adjectives can still be distinguished on the basis of three behaviors. First, adjectives do not take aspect marking. Second, when it comes to modification, adjectives are simply juxtaposed with the noun, as is the case in many languages, rather than using eg. a relative clause strategy:

man tall-CLF
"tall man/men"

Finally, unlike verbs, adjectives always use numeral classifier suffixes

Person-Marking:
Person-marking is accusative.
Verbs use person/number prefixes to mark subjects, and person/number suffixes to mark objects. There is also a series of independent "emphatic" personal pronouns. This language has Differential Object Indexing: only "definite" objects are marked on the verb. The cutoff for definiteness does not exactly correspond to English use of the definite article. What matters is pragmatic specificity: roughly speaking, participants that are prominent enough in the discourse to be likely to be mentioned again.

Some examples:

semantically nonspecific object:
Julia 3sg-fear horse
“Julia is afraid of horses” (context: I’m describing a propensity Julia has, not her reaction to a specific horse)

pragmatically nonspecific object:
1sg-kick-PRFV rock
"I kicked a rock/some rocks" (context: I’m describing various things I did as I walked along a path)

pragmatically specific object:
So, 1sg-see-3sg movie one-CLF, and 3sg-good…
“So, I saw this movie, and it was good” (context: I’m describing my reaction to a previously unidentified movie I saw last night)

Inactive, definite object:
1sg-meet-PRFV-3sg king
“I met the king” (context: I’m talking about a specific monarch whose identity is known to both speaker and addressee, who has not previously been mentioned)

Semi-active object:
1sg-smash-PRFV-3pl bottle that-CLF
“I smashed the bottles” (context: I’m referring back to bottles that have previously been mentioned, but are not maximally salient)

Active object:
1sg-know-3sg
“I know him” (context: I’m talking about the maximally salient entities in the discourse)

As you can see, object agreement can be triggered from “both directions”: by an object being in the implicit or explicit “background” of an assertion, or by anticipation of an object coming into the "foreground".

(Now is a good time to talk about articles. This language has nothing corresponding exactly to an English definite or indefinite article, but it does have articles that cover some of this space. The numeral “one” is used as a presentational article, for introducing prominent new discourse participants, as in the movie example above. Demonstratives can be optionally used as anaphoric articles)

[Arayaz]

Very nice so far!

[Solarius]

This is really cool looking, and I definitely appreciate a more morphosyntactically-oriented approach to making a language -- lots of conlangers, myself included, often get wrapped up in angsting over minor phonological details.

How do the numeral classifier suffixes work?

[eldin raigmore]

@Accept Knot:
This was fun to read!
And, you have some features of your proposed new conlang, that I’d really like to see developed!
I intend to follow this!
….
@Solarius: I also want to see the answer to your question! Thanks for posting it!