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I know we've had threads like this for phonology before, but I'm curious. Do you guys have preferences for certain grammatical features? For example, do you prefer a presence or absence of grammatical number? A particular constituent order? A particular morphosyntactic alignment?

If you do have defined preferences, do you think they've influenced your conlanging?

Ergativity turns my crank.

And yes.

Chengjiang wrote:I know we've had threads like this for phonology before

I've been here for a number of years, and I don't recall any. Some of the member censuses included the question "most/least favorite phone", and that was it.

I personally like ergativity myself, but occasionally I will create an accusative language. My older languages (now probably lost) used to all be SOV, but more recently I have switched to VSO languages, and my most recent language is SVO. My SOV languages were all consistently head-final and suffixing while my VSO languages have been mostly head-initial and a mixture of prefixing and suffixing and my SVO language has been head-initial but suffixing. In my older languages I tended to unify verbs and adjectives, but then I switched away from doing that, but then have switched back for my most recent language. I also used to favor large sets of case suffixes or postpositions, but in my second-most recent language I opted for only minimal case (mostly so I could easily distinguish construct state nouns by its absence) and instead focused primarily on a medium-sized set of prepositions and a larger set of relational nouns, and in my most recent language I opted for no case or traditional adpositions at all and instead for verbs (in serial verb constructions and relative clauses) acting in the place of adpositions. I initially favored having no definiteness, but more recently have tended towards having a definiteness distinction, either as an affix on the noun, a determiner on the noun phrase, or as affixes on multiple constituents of the noun phrase (e.g. both nouns and adjectives). I have tended to favor marking possession on the noun, but in my most language I opted instead for possessive determiners (since this language also uses determiners to mark definiteness and act as demonstratives). I have tended to mark number on pronouns, nouns, verbs, and when adjectives are separate from verbs, verbs, but in my most recent language I have opted for only marking number on verbs (which are unified with adjectives) and personal pronouns. I have also tended to favor mixed singular-plural and collective-singulative number systems, but sometimes (as in my most recent language) I have opted for a singular-dual-plural system instead. In a couple of my languages, such as my most recent language, I have had an exclusive-inclusive distinction in the first person. I have generally had a small (2-3) gender system in my languages, either masculine-feminine, masculine-feminine-neuter, or animate-inanimate, but in a couple of my languages such as my most recent I have opted for no gender at all. I like putting perfectivity distinctions in my languages, sometimes have more aspect distinctions in my languages (e.g. separating imperfective into progressive and habitual and perfective into plain perfective, inchoative, etc.), but generally have either very small tense systems (non-past versus past) or no tense at all (or tense conflated with perfectivity), even though I once did make a language with a past-present-future tense system, and when I do allow more complex systems of tense to be expressed I do so periphrasically or through using a perfective non-past to express the future. I also put polypersonal agreement in most of my languages.

Sorry for copying another members commebnt but typing on this computer is a pain. obv, couldve typed it myself in the time i typed this&thuis, buit some words 're harder than others.

My SOV languages are all consistently head-final and suffixing <--- me too

i like hugely fusional languaghes, even polysynthetic ones, so that .e.g a 2 word sentence can mean "the ice cream is made out of your milk". ("nobellwam bwul") or one word can mean "children playing together" (taempom). I use so many inflections that i basically have free word order, but i prefer SOV as the default order because that way the verb "faces" the next clause, and since pronouns are very rarel;y used that verb often holds the markers for subj&obj as lwell.

It's a fairly specific thing, but I'm not a fan of pronouns with sex-based gender distinctions. It can make referring to non-binary people clumsier than it needs to be, and it provides another way for people to casually disrespect and/or dehumanize trans people. Not that people couldn't do that in a language without grammatical gender, but it can be, at the very least, annoying.

I like rhyming verse, and as a result I'm not a huge fan of languages in which most words have to take inflectional suffixes. In fact, I'd say that I generally prefer more isolating languages over more synthetic ones, though I do think that the bipartite verb stems found in some of the languages of western North America are really cool. An example of this sort of formation would be the instrumental prefixes found in Klamath, which can turn an intransitive "change of state" verb into a number of different transitive verb stems. For instance, the root caay’a can be used by itself as an intransitive verb meaning "become split or gashed," or can be made into a transitive stem like wcay’a "to split or gash using a long instrument," c’lacaay'a "to split or gash using the fingernail, or lacy’a "split or gash something using a three-dimensional object."

I'm also a fan of verb-initial syntax, though I couldn't say why, exactly. As far as morphosyntactic alignment goes, I tend to stick with more-or-less vanilla Nominative-Accusative systems. I can wrap my head around ergativity, but it always sort of gives me a brain-ache.

I don't have a lot of really strong preferences, but a few things do occur to me.

I like:

• Topic prominence.
• Clusivity distinctions in (generally first-person non-singular) pronouns.
• Pro-drop.
• Possessive affixes.
• Grammatical particles that encode several things at once, such as the contractions of certain prepositions with articles in Romance languages or Hausa's marking of verb tense on the subject pronoun. They needn't necessarily be fusional, just short.
• Split ergativity based on animacy or agentivity.
• Verb-initial or verb-final as the default constituent order.

I dislike:

• Subject prominence.
• Gendered pronouns in languages that have neither grammatical gender nor gender-based speech registers.
• To a lesser extent, grammatical gender itself if it's a classically IE-style masculine/feminine or masculine/feminine/neuter system.
• Gaps in pronominal number à la English you.
• "Dead weight" morphology, i.e. morphology whose paradigm is too broken for it to convey information as opposed to just grammatical agreement, e.g. the third person singular present verb suffix in English.
• Split ergativity based on tense/aspect.
• Trial number.
• Verb-medial as the default constituent order.

As for whether these preferences have influenced my conlanging: Yes. Yes they have. I don't entirely shy away from making languages with features I dislike, but I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't at least somewhat overrepresent features I like.

(You may notice that English has a lot of the features I dislike. Every now and then I get a mad urge to "improve" English. As yet I've never followed it. I don't dislike English as a whole; it also has a number of features I find kind of cool, like its flexible verb valency, e.g. "The rice is cooking" vs. "Sam is cooking the rice", or its propensity for zero derivation.)

I have always liked agglutinative and especially polysynthetic morphology with considerable head-marking and derivational affixes and such. I find that I really tend to favor a head-final syntax and suffixes over prefixes as well.

I love polysynthesis, noun-incorporation and polypersonal agreement with more minimal on nouns, which may include case but generally not number. I also like at most one tense distinction (past vs. non-past of future vs. non-future), instead using aspect more, accompanied by a large number of moods, including several dependant moods inspired by Inuit languages, as well as a large number of voices, including several applicatives. I also prefer a dechticaetiative alignment for ditransitive verbs.

Edit: I also like not having, or having very few, adpositions, instead preferring verbal constructions, or even verb-marking

About half of my languages are ergative/absolutive. I have a strong preference for VSO; most of my languages that are not VSO are SOV. Most of my languages are inflecting, but I've been trying my hand at isolating languages lately--and my ultimate unfulfilled ambition is to create a polysynthetic conlang. I seem to end up with a lot of CV(C) langs, and very few of my languages allow null onsets. I seem to have a lot of languages with singular/dual/plural distinctions, and I even have one family that has singular/dual/paucal/plural distinctions. I like obviate pronouns. And a lot of my languages seem to have gender, either masculine/feminine or animate/inanimate, but only one has noun classes. And I prefer suffixed to prefixed grammar--only one of my languages has generally prefixed grammar. I overall prefer to distinguish aspect only rather than tense.

I prefer languages with rich inflectional morphology, especially well-developed case systems, and complex morphosyntactic alignments. Like what is found in the Caucasus: Georgian is IMHO one of the coolest languages of the planet, and Old Albic owes very much to it.

Looking in this thread, I feel like a bit of a thumb, but I'll go at this anyhow in the hopes I'll get some response that will inspire or criticisms that will push me to something interesting.

I strongly prefer analytic languages over fusional or agglutinative ones. I don't like exactly hardlining the analytic end, so usually I'll have a small handful of features that are bound particles or clitics; usually they are high frequency in usage. I tend to avoid topic-prominence, since working more on the analytic end and pushing topic-prominence makes me feel like I'm doing a Chinese or Vietnamese baby.

Stemming from the analytic end, I like syntax that is well established, but that has lots of little twists and turns to it. For example, while I may require subordinating clauses to indicate indirect objects, I like having an exception for bare pronouns in this case. I'm sort of 50-50 on the use of prepositions in any guise (as true prepostitions, verbs, or adjectives). There's a lot of fun on using relational nouns to cover this, and it is something I'm favorable towards. I often avoid allowing relative clauses easily instead having a preference for appositives, direct verbal augmentation, or uses of possessives on NPs to accomplish a similar end.

I love having dependent verb forms or constructions. Having things that are restricted to dependent clauses is a nice twist to syntax that I feel can push a reader to keep going since it is something novel to encounter later on after the initial intro.

I often prefer pro-drop based on inference, not so much because it is neat but moreso because I really love having fun ways to work with switch-reference. SR is something I like since it works with the language at a full discourse level. I've played around with it not only for when verbal subjects are different, but also on other relations, such as topicality, volition, continuity of actions, etc. I feel there is a lot of fun and strangeness that can be exploited from SR.

I'm sort of 50-50 on odd things like Ba-structure in Mandarin. It really plays the syntax game wicked hard, but it is really tricky to work neatly. Most of the time I avoid it because I think it can be off-putting for a lot of people, and because it gives a very strong Sinitic smell to a conlang.

I like having definite articles, though I rarely use them. I'm especially fond of Hawaiian style definite articles where they are the primary marker of a lot of information on the noun. I'd love to use them some day to not only mark number, but also case, possession, maybe even stranger things like tense or aspect. I like seeing them in abundance, more to the style Greek uses them rather than English.

In terms of synthesis, I am easy. I like anything in the wide range between (but excluding) utter isolation and full-blown polysynthesis. In other words, I dislike a complete or near-compete reliance on either morphology or syntax, preferring an interplay between the two.

I seem to prefer strongly, but not absolutely head-final word order. I think there is an interesting dramatic tension to saving the main bit for last. Head-initial order feels a bit anticlimactic to me.

I like non nom-acc alignments, manifested syntactically. Nom-acc feels incomplete to me, as though I'm forgetting to do something.

I like TMA-conditioned split ergativity.

I like applicatives.

I like to play with person/number distinctions (meaning, among other things, that there is almost always clusivity) and definiteness.

I also like to play with volition and telicity.

I like transitivity to be affected by things other than the mere presence or absence of an object--things like definiteness of the object, success, realis status, etc.

I prefer aspect to tense. I like tense being optional, it's use being pragmatically determined. Systems that lack tense altogether are fun as well.

I like me a proximate-obviative distinction.

The above are mild, vague tendencies. I am not wedded to them and actually dislike the idea of having any feature I use (or avoid) invariably. But some of them (head final order, weird syntactic MSA, clusivity, applicatives) I find myself using reflexively.

cromulant wrote:... I find myself using reflexively.

Soooooo.... you like reflexives as well?

...


Sorry. That was horrible.

Burke wrote:Looking in this thread, I feel like a bit of a thumb, but I'll go at this anyhow in the hopes I'll get some response that will inspire or criticisms that will push me to something interesting.

Hey, do what you like. And there's plenty of room for languages fitting the description you gave here to be interesting.

I love polysynthetic languages (especially of the not-completely-agglutinative type with elaborate morphophonology and some synchronically unpredictable affix allomorphs), polypersonal agreement, noun incorporation, lexical instrument/manner/location/direction affixes, applicatives and other voice-and-valency-changing morphology. Going along with this, I like it when most of the information in a clause is contained in the verb, which allows dropping of all nominal arguments unless they're relevant pragmatically. I also like an ability to use fully inflected verbs as nouns (i.e. headless relative clauses, preferably without any specific marking) and a rather flat syntax where adverbial clauses are syntactically coordinated instead of subordinated.

(That said, my favorite conlang of my own, Ronc Tyu, is strongly isolating, has no participant marking at all and relies heavily on serial verbs and other analytic constructions.)

I generally prefer evidentiality over mood, and aspect over tense. As far as noun phrases go, I tend to avoid case marking (apart from very basic NOM-ACC or ERG-ABS systems, optionally with a single genitive/oblique case). I don't really like gender, but some of my languages have either an animacy distinction or a shape-based noun class system. Number marking is usually present, but often quite irregular both morphologically and semantically. I also often find myself using morphological possessive affixes.

With regard to word order, I tend to avoid SVO (although Ronc Tyu uses that as its default), often in favor of verb-initial syntax. Almost all of my conlangs allow either VSO or VOS, even if they're mostly head-final otherwise. SOV is nice too, but it tends to feel a bit too strict at times. I also like having lots of special syntactic constructions for expressing things that are not expressed morphologically, such as volition, attitude of the speaker, telicity, topicality, or other pragmatic notions.

I also pay a lot of attention to the way my languages' lexicons are structured. One of the most obvious things is that many of my conlangs don't have a separate lexical class of adjectives, usually using stative verbs instead. I also like to lexicalise some other prototypically non-verbal concepts as verbs, e.g. kinship terms and numbers. I like to disallow the formation of abstract nouns, so that these concepts have to be expressed as a full clause. Last but not least, I often try to include rather specific lexical distinctions (for instance, Ronc Tyu has nine different basic motion verbs ("come" and "go") which are selected based on the person and animacy of the source and target of movement; Doayâu similarly has three different verbs for "give" depending on whether and in which role the speaker is involved, and Hkətl'ohnim distinguishes between different "do" verbs for physical and mental activities respectively).

Cedh wrote: I also like to lexicalise some other prototypically non-verbal concepts as verbs, e.g. kinship terms and numbers.

This really caught my eye because I'm unfamiliar with this. Would you care to explain this a bit more fully possibly with examples from your conlang? I'm more interested in the numeric than familial in this case, but both would be cool. What natlangs do this?

Burke wrote:

Cedh wrote: I also like to lexicalise some other prototypically non-verbal concepts as verbs, e.g. kinship terms and numbers.

This really caught my eye because I'm unfamiliar with this. Would you care to explain this a bit more fully possibly with examples from your conlang? I'm more interested in the numeric than familial in this case, but both would be cool. What natlangs do this?

My conlang Frislandian does this with the kinship terms. They are rendered as transitive verbs describing a relationship. For example, the word for "father/paternal uncle ", the verb "apa, ave", is probably better translated as the verb "to father/be maternal uncle to", and is used with in the definite form to denote both father and child relations at the same time, for example:

apamke

father.DEF.1-3.ERG

"He's my father" or "I'm his son/daughter" or "He's my father's brother"or "I'm his brother's son"

saamasum

maternal.uncle.DEF.2-1.ERG

"I'm your maternal uncle" or "Your my neice/nephew" or even "Your my sister's child"

In the indefinite form, however, it merely serves to denote that such a relationship exists, not to denote those in the relationship.

ave

father.IND.3

"He's a father" or "He has a child by his brother"

komrytjen

cousin.IND.2-3.PL.ACC

"You have some counsins"

("Definite" and "Indefinite" are simply labels for verb forms which denote transitive verbs with definite direct objects and intransitive verbs with indefinite objects as well as intransitive verbs, respectively)

(Note also the Iroquoian kinship system)

Unfortunately my numbers, like other "adjectives" are basically in the same category as nouns, so I can't give you good examples of verbal numbers working there.

As for natlangs, the Iroquoian languages are probably the most well studied of the languages that have them, though there are also occurences in California and Australia. As for numeral verbs, Bella Coola apparently has them (although the propensity for NWC languages to use nouns in predicate function may make such an analysis suspect; c.f. Nootka, where numerals are nominal but otherwise are perfectly capable of standing in as a predicate head).

Edit: updated the "father" to better reflect the actual meanings of the terms.

What Karero describes is essentially how it works for kinship terms, yes. And the inspiration for this indeed came from Iroquoian (Oneida, to be precise). Here are a few examples from my conlang Hkətl’ohnim:

Həhwaq’mə.
həhʷ-aq’məʷ
3SG>3:DEICTIC.NP-be_parent_of
She is his mother. (can also be used as a headless relative clause to simply mean "mother")

Ritsōł.
rəy-tsōł
2SG>1SG.NP-be_descendant_of
You are my child.


For quantifiers I have actually written down something already:

Hkətl’ohnim grammar sketch wrote: Hkətl’ohnim quantifiers are mostly verbal in nature. When they are used as the main verb of a clause, the meaning is existential if the referent is non-deictic, and predicative if the referent is deictic.

Nəsā mahə.
nə-sā n-wahə-Ø
3PL.NP-three 3PL-lion-DIR
There are three lions.

Nəsā maħqʷ.
nə-sā n-waħqʷ-Ø
3PL.NP-three 3PL-lion.DIST-DIR
Those lions, there are three of them.

An ordinal meaning can be achieved by using singular agreement.

Həsā wahə.
hə-sā Ø-wahə-Ø
3SG.NP-three 3SG-lion-DIR
He is the third lion.

When the referent is non-deictic, it can be backgrounded by being incorporated into the numeral. Because quantifier verbs are normally intransitive, they must take a causative suffix when used in this construction.

Nəwahəsāq.
nə-<wahə>-sā-q
3PL.NP-<lion>-three-CAUS
There are three (lions).

The following example shows how the full range of verbal morphology can be used to expand the meaning of numerals:

Tēqasāqałtəht mahə.
t-ēq-sā-qałt-əht n-wahə-Ø
3PL.PST-there-three-ITER-ADVERS 3PL-lion-DIR
Unfortunately, there were often three lions at that place.

Since most of my languages eventually boil down towards the same mean, I have found that I like --

Phonetics. A three or four way voicing contrast without using globalization/ejectives/implosives. A starved vowel quality inventory that is typically arranged vertically.
Morphological Type. Synthetic-fusional to Synthetic-polyfusional. The polyfusional bits are typically limited to pronouns and verb terminations (which are typically spiffy pronouns themselves). Smallish case system: 3-4 cases (E.g., NOM~DIR, ACC, DAT or ABL, LOC). Either no genders/noun classes or a system opposing diminutive v. augmentative which can be further pumped up with derivation diminutives and augmentatives. Deixis marking all over the place: verbs (often on several morphemes), pronouns (even personal ones), certain classes of nouns, and local cases (which are typically fossilized demonstratives). Unusual person and number marking -- always. Heavy on aspect or fused aspect-tenses . . . meh on straight tenses. Verbal number seems good too but not as a proxy for polypersonal agreement -- not a fan of that or of suffixaufnahme.
Morphosyntactic Type. Split: by default, direct with differential object marking based on animacy or something; ergative, triggered by aspect perfective or retrospective typically, again with differential object marking. All of the proceeding is usually layered with differential subject marking for volition/involvement depending on the verb class. The subject marking typically has three or four variable mirroring the case system.
Word Order. Rigid word order. Left Branching SxOV.

I like a lot of things that are common from a worldwide perspective but rare from a European one. The majority of my languages have multiple kinds of reduplication on different word classes and polypersonal agreement. Common are core TAM marking not being tense-based, no distinct category of adjectives, multiple applicatives, and noun incorporation.

A few things I like, but keep uncommon: suffixaufnahme, head-marking the presence of a dependent (construct state, verbal case), hierarchical or direct-inverse agreement, verbal plurality, active alignment, and animacy-based split ergativity.

I'm another that doesn't particularly like SVO word order, and I'll add case systems that are just small variations on the western IE nom-acc-dat-gen-(abl). Now Kabardian's system of (intransitive, transitive patient) (transitive agent, recipient, goal of movement, spatial or temporal location, non-restrictive relative clause) (manner of action, nominal predicate, some attributives, poetic vocative) (instrument, path, some agents of participles) is interesting.