Grammaticalization Quickie Thread

[gach]

Sure you can use the term "case" for grammatical roles and it can do a fair job at it especially in describing core roles in languages that lack morphological case. My preference is just to reserve the term for the language specific morphological categories especially since very often single morphological cases cover a number of different syntactic roles in the same language (like nominative for subjects and nominal predicates or ergative for agents and instruments). It's of course perfectly fine to use case names for clitics or adpositions if they do comparable jobs. It's anyway only terminology we are talking about.

[sucaeyl]

Sure you can use the term "case" for grammatical roles and it can do a fair job at it especially in describing core roles in languages that lack morphological case. My preference is just to reserve the term for the language specific morphological categories especially since very often single morphological cases cover a number of different syntactic roles in the same language (like nominative for subjects and nominal predicates or ergative for agents and instruments). It's of course perfectly fine to use case names for clitics or adpositions if they do comparable jobs. It's anyway only terminology we are talking about.

Yeah, that's true. And you make good points! I just wish it were less ambiguous.

On a different note, how can copulae develop? Would English 'make' count? As in 'They make a good couple'. Is 'to create' ~> 'to be' an otherwise attested path of grammaticalization?

[Nannalu]

To help with my Proto-Mets': Does anyone know how languages (who don't distinguish hand/fingers) makes the distinction if they are speaking about a specific finger such as the index or middle fingers?

[Yng]

Often when languages 'don't make the distinction', this only means on a primary level, right? So languages might have a word for 'finger' and a word for 'palm' whilst still including them both under 'hand' (or likewise, 'hand' and 'arm').

Otherwise though - maybe they just... don't talk about fingers?

[sucaeyl]

Otherwise though - maybe they just... don't talk about fingers?

Surely they must have a way to... I can't think of a culture where such a distinction would never be important. In a language that has one word for "hand" and "arm", it still must be important to make a distinction between 'I hurt my elbow' 'I hurt my wrist' and 'I hurt my thumb', all categories that would normally be labelled under this one term. Right? Now I can't remember the technical term for this, but maybe they just use on-the-fly circumlocutions for this purpose, some of which may become standard over time.

[Yng]

Not really - you can just say 'I hurt my arm here' or whatever. Colloquial Arabic when talking about these things makes no distinction from the shoulder down; many speakers I've met don't really have distinct words for upper/lower arm, hand and elbow in their active vocabulary. As for fingers, these seem intuitively more distinct (but then I am a native English speaker...) but remember, there are languages without counting systems and all sorts of crazy shit which seems completely necessary.

[KathTheDragon]

Paraphrasing?

[vokzhen]

Not really - you can just say 'I hurt my arm here' or whatever. Colloquial Arabic when talking about these things makes no distinction from the shoulder down; many speakers I've met don't really have distinct words for upper/lower arm, hand and elbow in their active vocabulary. As for fingers, these seem intuitively more distinct (but then I am a native English speaker...) but remember, there are languages without counting systems and all sorts of crazy shit which seems completely necessary.

So in colloquial Arabic, how does one refer to a specific finger? Say you injured your index finger and are talking over the phone/text (no "this part of my arm" as you could face-to-face), how do you reference it?

[Yng]

Arabic does have a word for 'finger', sorry if that wasn't clear (I was talking about the arm-hand distinction which doesn't exist). The thing is though I stand by what I said - you don't really NEED a word for finger if you can just say 'this part of my hand' or come up with a description or paraphrase.

[sucaeyl]

Arabic does have a word for 'finger', sorry if that wasn't clear (I was talking about the arm-hand distinction which doesn't exist). The thing is though I stand by what I said - you don't really NEED a word for finger if you can just say 'this part of my hand' or come up with a description or paraphrase.

How do these paraphrases work? I would imagine that, within a dialect, there is a fairly set way to paraphrastically refer to a specific finger, instead of being made up on-the-fly each time. In general, I wonder what determines how susceptible a paraphrase is to becoming... solidified?

On a similar note, is there any semantic realm that English typically has to talk about paraphrastically, but cross-linguistically, it is common to make lexical distinctions? (I don't know if that's quite the right terminology)

[vokzhen]

A classic one is knowing (someone) versus knowing (about something) versus knowing (how to do something).

[Yng]

How do these paraphrases work? I would imagine that, within a dialect, there is a fairly set way to paraphrastically refer to a specific finger, instead of being made up on-the-fly each time. In general, I wonder what determines how susceptible a paraphrase is to becoming... solidified?

Maybe, but not necessarily. I think you're still operating within a mindset that suggests that referring to fingers in some distinct way is an incredibly urgent and necessary thing that people need to talk about regularly, though. Sure, there tend to be conventional ways of paraphrasing things in given languages (which often means that non-native paraphrases, though making sense, sound weird) but that's not to say that they're the same as established set phrases - I think that only becomes the case once they take on meaning beyond their constituent parts, maybe? Anyway the point is you just might not ever be in a situation where you have to distinguish your finger from the rest of your hand.

[sucaeyl]

How can split-ergative systems arise from nominative-accusative alignment? In particular, I'm looking to create a system of syntactic ergativity, split along a tense distinction:

Non-past:

A verb P
S verb

Past:

A verb P
verb S

[Cedh]

How can split-ergative systems arise from nominative-accusative alignment?

Have a look here, for example: http://ceias.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/55 ... elfg06.pdf

[CaesarVincens]

Sure you can use the term "case" for grammatical roles and it can do a fair job at it especially in describing core roles in languages that lack morphological case. My preference is just to reserve the term for the language specific morphological categories especially since very often single morphological cases cover a number of different syntactic roles in the same language (like nominative for subjects and nominal predicates or ergative for agents and instruments). It's of course perfectly fine to use case names for clitics or adpositions if they do comparable jobs. It's anyway only terminology we are talking about.

Yeah, that's true. And you make good points! I just wish it were less ambiguous.

On a different note, how can copulae develop? Would English 'make' count? As in 'They make a good couple'. Is 'to create' ~> 'to be' an otherwise attested path of grammaticalization?

That might work. "BECOME" is an attested source of copula as well as "STAND". Since a reflexive MAKE is similar to BECOME I see that working after some semantic shift. It might have some interesting morphology/syntax (with reflexive stuff).

[WeepingElf]

How about a definite marker becoming a perfective marker?

In Old Albic, I have a definite article a, which is of West Hesperic vintage. The same language also has a perfective prefix, the "augment" °- (a vowel that assimilates to the root vowel). Both reflect Proto-Hesperic *a. I think this could both be descendants of a Proto-Hesperic free-standing definite marker *a, which could combine with both nouns and verbs.

Your opinions? Natlang precedents?

[TinyMusic]

I'm trying to form verbal conjugation by attaching pronouns at the end of verbs - so conjugation marks person. This would make a regular system, but I want some irregularity as well. How do you make different classes of conjugation, and how do they arise in natlangs?

[vokzhen]

Most probably come from regular sound changes. Starting as early as cliticization, where e.g. 1S "isi" attaches to mat as mat=is, mak as mak=is, maka as maka=si, and maki as maki=is. A couple sound changes later and we have mat-/mat-i, mak-/matʃi, maka-/mak-si, and maki-/mak-ee. Add another thousand years of sound changes, plus likely analogical leveling (maybe mak/matʃi becomes matʃ/matʃi and is assigned to the same class at mat/mati) and the original pattern of stem+isi is unrecoverable.

It's possible certain words cliticize differently. Say transitives allow their pronouns to be phonologically reduced, but intransitives don't until after transitives have mandatory agreement (by which time the pronouns themselves have changed as well). So we have Old (transitive) and New (intransitive) conjugations. But some intransitives may begin to be used transitively, and vice versa, and maybe some start gaining valence-altering affixes, all the while retaining their conjugation patterns, and after a time there's two different conjugation classes being used without transparent rules.

[Miekko]

How about a definite marker becoming a perfective marker?

In Old Albic, I have a definite article a, which is of West Hesperic vintage. The same language also has a perfective prefix, the "augment" °- (a vowel that assimilates to the root vowel). Both reflect Proto-Hesperic *a. I think this could both be descendants of a Proto-Hesperic free-standing definite marker *a, which could combine with both nouns and verbs.

Your opinions? Natlang precedents?

There's a correlation between definite objects and perfectiveness (and telicity, and a bunch of other similar things.) So it seems to make sense.

[Neon Fox]

...does this imply a state, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago, shortly after some 'dawn of language', when languages had many words for concrete concepts but were still in the process of creating those first words for abstract and grammatical notions? Does this imply that (nearly?) every abstract or grammatical word or affix evolved ultimately from words denoting entirely concrete concepts?

Have you read The Unfolding of Language by Deutsch?

The ultra-condensed tl;dr of his argument is pretty much exactly this. You start out with words for physical actions and objects, and one or two "pointing" words along the lines of "this" and "that", and everything accretes from there. Pronouns develop out of worn-down versions of "this one here" and "that one there"; abstract verbs and nouns come from analogy to physical ones; adjectives come from shortening "the stone I cut things with" into "the sharp stone", and once you have the idea of modifiers you can expand it; words for positions come out of words for body parts. Etc etc.

[Neon Fox]

On a similar note, is there any semantic realm that English typically has to talk about paraphrastically, but cross-linguistically, it is common to make lexical distinctions? (I don't know if that's quite the right terminology)

How about direction of movement? English has a bunch of handy words for it (descend, e.g.) but they're mostly borrowings from French. Natively you have to say "go down".

[CaesarVincens]

On a similar note, is there any semantic realm that English typically has to talk about paraphrastically, but cross-linguistically, it is common to make lexical distinctions? (I don't know if that's quite the right terminology)

How about direction of movement? English has a bunch of handy words for it (descend, e.g.) but they're mostly borrowings from French. Natively you have to say "go down".

In contrast, most Romance languages verbs of motion describe the path rather than the manner of motion (like English and most other Germanic languages, afaiu).

[StrangerCoug]

What are good ways to realistically create different registers of the same conlang (acrolectal, literary, "textbooky", etc.)?

[gach]

What are good ways to realistically create different registers of the same conlang (acrolectal, literary, "textbooky", etc.)?

Written language is a good preservative for archaic features. So if you have that, it's likely that you'll soon start developing a spectrum of registers stretching from innovative spoken varieties to more archaic written forms of the language. Even if there isn't any written language, certain genres of oral literature can be much more resistant to change than informal speech. Literary norms also tend towards increased standardisation. Some grammatical structures or morphological variants available in unregulated registers might be suppressed in the literary norm and the literary language can even develop new structures that have never existed in any naturally evolved dialect though eager analogising.

Different registers can also develop starting from different dialects if these dialects get associated with different social contexts. Think for example the different literary use of the Ancient Greek dialects. Or if there are influential foreign languages, these might creep in through increased loaning into certain registers. This would be equivalent to peppering your language with Greek and Latin big words to appear wise and well read.

Lastly, different registers are for different social circumstances and in some registers you'll find a constant stream of profanities while in others you have to make an effort to hide any unnecessary reference to bodily functions.

[احمکي ارش-ھجن]

For my 3con language, how do I diachronically come up with patterns that geminate the final consonant of a root and patterns that geminate the first consonant of a root?