Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by nmnmv123 »

First of all, before I even get to the question, just want to apologize for any formatting/other weird issues, or if I posted this in the wrong place - I'm new to the forum

Relevant background information: nyokSol /nʲokʃol/ is a head-marking polysynthetic language with noun incorporation and VSO word order. For simple declarative sentences, I have no trouble translating things, but I have absolutely no idea how to incorporate a noun that is part of a complex noun phrase. For example, "You are filled with determination" - I asked a question about something similar on /r/conlangs, and the response was (as far as I can understand), that polysynthetic langs can strand things things like adjectival phrases ("I bought a red book" --> "I book-bought a red"), and that most don't incorporate things like genitives, adpositional phrases, etc. However, the same response also went on to say that some langs allow the cases in question (genitive, benefactive, instrumental, ablative, etc) to be incorporated on the noun, then treat that whole noun as an object and incorporate it as an applicative.

So, I understand the first part (stranding adj.), but I want to be able to incorporate entire noun phrases, so I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of applicatives (and incorporation). Basically, am I getting this right :

Starting with a ditransitive verb, the direct object is incorporated. The cases merge onto the indirect object.
1) I bought toys for my cat --> 1SN-toy-bought (PL) 1SN-GEN BEN-cat
The cases "move" from the noun to the verb, and the indirect object is promoted to direct object of the now-applicative-voiced verb.
2) 1SN-toy-bought-GEN-BEN (PL) cat
Could the object then be incorporated again into the object, and if so, where - right after the applicative, or next to the original DO?
3???) 1SN-toy-cat-bought-GEN-BEN (PL)


Could this also be expanded for nested noun phrases? (ex: I bought toys for my cat's mouse --> 1SG-toy-cat-mouse-bought-GEN-BEN-GEN)

Now, onto the original sentence - "You are filled with determination" (I think it's an intransitive passive? Correct me if I'm wrong). Could I translate it as "2SN.OBJ-determination-filled-INS"?
Sorry for the long post, and thanks for any help!
Conlangs
nyokSol /njokʃol/ - WIP
Dravko /ɖaɸkɔ/ - planned
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/ɛnɛmɛnɛmˈvi/ - noobing intensifies

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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by Zaarin »

First off, kudos to you for making a polysynthetic conlang--it's a personal goal of mine, but one I've not been brave enough to tackle yet. :)

I am by no means an expert on polysynthetic languages, but from my passing familiarity with them I can make a few comments (though my experience comes almost exclusively from New World languages, so perhaps some of my generalizations would be less appropriate if taking into account something like the Caucasian languages...).

First, it seems that there's generally a hierarchy regarding what nouns are incorporated into verbs. Body parts are far and away the most common, followed by other more concrete nouns; abstract nouns seem to be rarely incorporated.

Second, you are correct: an adjective (or adjective-like verb, since true adjectives seem to be rare in polysynthetic languages) can indeed modify an incorporated noun. At any rate, this is how it works in Mohawk, Nez Perce, and Tlingit. To use your example, it would probably look something like this (taking into account your VSO order):

book.bought-1s.NOM being.red-3s.NOM (OR book.bought-1s.NOM being.red-4s.NOM -- many North American polysynthetic languages have oblique pronouns that, among other things, are used to refer to incorporated nouns)

Third, I have no clue if there is an actual correlation, but there seems to be a trend for polysynthetic languages to be either ergative/absolutive or active/stative. I can confirm this is the case for Iroquoian, (most?) Na-Dené, (most?) Siouan, Salishan, and at least some Caucasian languages. On the other hand, ergativity is not an uncommon feature of North American languages, polysynthetic or otherwise, so this may simply be a case of sample bias. Just thought it might be worth mentioning.

As for case being incorporated with the noun, that's not a feature I'm familiar with, so I'll have to let someone who knows more about the topic than I do answer that portion of your question.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by garysk »

First, I have to echo Zaarin's kudos: this is surely a daunting task you have set for yourself.

Second, a general comment on "is this right" when applied to conlangs: if the author creates a coherent system capable of expressing human thought and describing human and natural activities and processes that is sufficiently redundant so as to resolve most ambiguities from the point of view of its speakers, then it is "right".

Aside from the above and a few generally true "universals", conlangs can work however you want.

If your goal is to do it like thus-and-such language does it, then that language is the standard you need to meet. If you have in mind using some isolated feature from another language, then the judgments can get a little more dicey, because there are practically no linguistic features that aren't the subject of some manner of dispute among the "authorities".

Third, on to specifics. (By the way, I'm talking through my hat on this, so take it all with a heaping of salt, and some sugar for good measure).

In regards to your "moving of cases to the verb" I wonder if this is a description for marking primary verbal arguments (subject, direct object, indirect object) and adjuncts (locationals, adverbs, sentence particles, etc) as inflections of the verb. For example, IE languages often mark the subject on the verb, regardless of whether there is also a noun phrase that fills the subject role. There are many "agglutinative" languages that mark the direct object and indirect object on the verb, in addition to the subject (or ergative), and there are languages that mark certain adjuncts (locatives, directionals, adverbs, particles) in the same system ot morpohological forms as are used to mark the primary verbal arguments.

The result could be something like:

* buy-PST-3SNOM-3SACC-3SBEN DEF.ART boy INDEF.ART gun POSV.ART CAT-3SGEN

* "The boy bought a gun for his cat"

Where each argument is reflected on the verb, and the noun phrases that are the actualizations of the arguments are listed in some predetermined order after the verb.

To incorporate even more of a sentence into the verbal complex, one could:

* buy-PST-TODAY-3SNOM-3SACC-3SBEN-3SLOC DEF.ART boy INDEF.ART gun POSV.ART CAT-3SGEN DEF.ART store

* "The boy bought a gun for his cat at the store today"

This doesn't really show noun incorporation, but this could be how it is done:

* buy-PST-TODAY-3S.DEF.NOM-3S.INDEF.ACC-3S.POSV.3SGEN.BEN-3S.DEF.LOC-<boy><gun><cat><store>

* "The boy bought a gun for his cat at the store today"

Typically, the <nouns> might be phonetically reduced versions of their absolute forms. As the Na Dene languages show, there seems to be no particular limit (to the English-speaking mind) to how much can be stuffed into the "verbal phrase". Though one feature that is common among the Athabascan family is that, with the verb as the "core" of the word, there are specific, specialized "slots" before and after the verb root where markings such as person, number, TAM, locatives, adverbs and so on are inserted (or not, if not needed for the sentence at hand). So, if one knows the slots, and the morphemes that are allowed in the slots, one can compose and decode the "word" successfully. There are also redundancies among some of the slots, so e.g., that if slot 5 contains a certain morpheme, then slot 11 must contain a certain other morpheme, and this helps the decoding process.

Your (unnumbered but still fourth) sentence is essentially as I have outlined above, though with a different order of the slots and incorporated morphemes.

What gets incorporated and what doesn't is probably not really material, as long as there are rules that the speakers can learn from their mothers, and that most speakers abide by. I am certain that first-language speakers of some of the North American polysynthetic languages make TONS of grammatical errors, especially if they are not schooled and drilled on the grammar, much as English speakers without formal education make many grammatical "errors". This is one place where ritual song, instrumentation, and dance can help preserve a highly complex grammatical structure, by making the morphemes have fixed, or at least predicable, places in the utterance, dictated by the rhythm and other, possibly suprasegmental, devices in the ritual. This is how the Vedas were preserved: they were of a strict metrical form, learned by rote generation after generation, and such errors that did creep in are detected by modern study because they are metrically incorrect, and a metrically correct word reinserted into the poem by modern scholarship to repair the error. Think of the metrical structure as being equivalent to a computer storage EEC (Electronic Error Correction) system.

On the subject of "filled with determination": it is not an intransitive passive, it is a transitive passive. Usually intransitive passives have a causative meaning. "I run" (intransitive active) "I am runned" (bad grammar intransitive passive meaning "I am caused to run". Intransitives, when passified, tend to not have instrumental agents. while passified transitives often do. (All said from a nominative/accusative alignment point of view, and ignoring the fact that the "causer" of the intransitive passive/causative could be treated as an agent, as some languages do).

Finally, I think you are probably on the right track, and simply have to make sure that the grammar forms some sort of cohesive internal logical structure, the exact nature of which is up to you.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by Frislander »

I will also echo garysk and Zaarin's kudos: head-marking and polysynthetic languages are things I feel we don't see enough of round here! I will also second all the advice they have given, which is very good.

Secondly, I would like to direct you to the seminal work on NI: Mithun's The Evolution of Noun Incorporation. This will be very informative and explain a lot of the points. I'm going to partly rely on this paper for some of my explanation, so I would seriously recommend reading through it before looking at the rest of my post.

Thirdly, I'd like to point out that possessors in polysynthetic/head-marking languages are almost always expressed with some form of marking on the possessed noun. Indeed, the only polysynthetic language I've seen which doesn't do that doesn't have noun-incorporation either, which makes it even less relevant to what I'm about to say. Thus "For my cat" would be expressed 1s-BEN-cat (if you have cases, more on that below).

OK, now for the long explanation. Let's look at the example you give. I'm going to change the subject of "bought" from 1st to 2nd person, for reasons which I will outline below.

2s-buy-PST-3pl toys 1s-BEN-cat "you bought toys for my cat"

We incorporate the direct object (in this case "toys") like so.

2s-toy-buy-PST 1s-BEN-cat

If your language has type-2 noun-incorporation (again see the paper linked to above), which I presume it what you're getting at, then that noun's possessor/some other oblique argument would be promoted to direct object position like so.

2s-toy-buy-PST-3s 1s-cat

Note that the noun "cat" has lost its case marking; that it has "gone". To get what you've been getting at below, you'd do the same again, giving:

2s-cat-toy-buy-PST-1s "You cat-toy-bought me"

(If we were to go with your given example with a 1st person subject, then that'd be something like 1s-cat-toy-buy-PST-REFL with a reflexive, which would mess it up slightly).

As to whether incoporation of multiple nouns is attested, then yes, it is definitely attested.

when it comes to stranding, type-2 NI sorts this out by promoting some of the arguments. If you wanted to incorporate the noun "shoes" in "I bought red shoes", then you'd get something like "I shoe-bought those which are red". Note the relative-clause structure: in many polysynthetic languages, particularly in North America, adjectives are practically indistinguishable from verbs (I can't speak for those polysynthetic languages in Northern Australia where, like in the rest of Australia, adjectives are basically the same as nouns. they must do something similar, but I haven't got round to finding out what).

You mention applicatives. I see where you're coming from, and you can put them in if you want. You'd then get something like this.

2s-toy-buy-PST-BNAP 1s-cat

But the point with applicatives is to promote a prominent noun-phrase, so why you'd the want to then incorporated it I don't know. There must be languages out there which allow incorporation of applied objects, but I can't think of any. You'd probably end up with something like this.

2s-cat-toy-buy-PST-BNAP

If you were to allow this sort of thing, I'd probably reserve a special slot within your verb complex for oblique nouns.

On the other hand, this could be a valuable tool for allowing you to incorporate oblique nouns in a language which otherwise only incorporates direct objects.

If what you mean by the moving of case markers is the incorporation of adpositions, then that is perfectly OK, and indeed is a very common occurrence in the history of the Na-Dené languages.

Now you don't need case markers or adpositions at all, really. There are quite a few languages out there which use verbs or nouns for the same purpose. These could possibly be stranded when the oblique noun is incorporated as well. An interesting possibility would be to permit verbal compounding as well (like serial verbs only in one verb). So "You bought toys for my cat" might be expressed thus:

2s-buy-give-PST toys 1s-cat

This is when unincorporated. Then when you incorporate the nouns you could have then before their respective verbs, like so:

2s-toy-buy-cat-give-PST-2s

(I am of course presuming you have a single, morphologically indivisible word for toy, which I doubt would be the case in a polysynthetic languege; you'd probably have a nominalised clause à la "that which is played with".)

Finally, if I was doing a polysynthetic language, I'd be tempted to express "you are filled with determination" with "determination fills you", which rather prevents incorporation (if you're going for naturalism at any rate".
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by 2+3 clusivity »

Her published section also has many other publically available sources on specific languages about NI -- among MANY other subjects.

http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty ... tions.html
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by garysk »

Thank you, Frislander, for injecting scholarly information into this thread. I'm afraid that I don't have the background you, and many, others have in actual linguistics, and always welcome such input when offered.
Frislander wrote:Secondly, I would like to direct you to the seminal work on NI: Mithun's The Evolution of Noun Incorporation. This will be very informative and explain a lot of the points. I'm going to partly rely on this paper for some of my explanation, so I would seriously recommend reading through it before looking at the rest of my post.
My primitive attempts at representing NI (how nice that there is an acronym for this) are only the most direct piling on of morphemes, without much considering how an PS language might express the sense of the sentence.
Frislander wrote:Thirdly, I'd like to point out that possessors in polysynthetic/head-marking languages are almost always expressed with some form of marking on the possessed noun.
I wrote:* buy-PST-TODAY-3S.DEF.NOM-3S.INDEF.ACC-3S.POSV.3SGEN.BEN-3S.DEF.LOC-<boy><gun><cat><store>

* "The boy bought a gun for his cat at the store today"
In the above example I invented a gloss for "this item is the object of a possessive" in the form of "POSV" (possessivized). Thus the sense of the third morpheme cluster "3S.POSV.3SGEN.BEN" is "this argument a third person singular is an object possessed by a third person singular entity, and is the benefactor of the verbal action". The second "third-person" in this extended phrase would likely be a candidate for a reflexive, as the cat is possessed by the boy, and the "third person" of "3S.DEF.LOC" would be an obviative form. Likewise, the locative "at the store" is really adverbial, and store could be incorporated up with the "TODAY" incorporated adverb:

* buy-PST-<store>.LOC-<today>-3S.DEF.NOM-3S.INDEF.ACC-3S.POSV.3SGEN.BEN-<boy><gun><cat>

Of course, the actual sentence order might be SOV (and without my slavish use of articles; I LIKE articles!):

* <boy>-<gun>-<store>.LOC-POSSD.<cat>.BEN-REFL.GEN-<today>-buy-PST-3S.NOM-4S.ACC

The third person of the "<gun>" is a candidate for obviaticity (?) hence the "4S.ACC" marking, and the benefactive becomes another adverbial construct like "<store>.LOC". And likely too the person/number/case markings on the verb would be omitted, as by the end of this "word" the speaker would be fatigued and would feel that the argument roles dictated by the verb's valence were clearly indicated by the word order.

The possibilities of word order, inflection, clitics, affixation are pretty endless. Just gotta be clear on the rules. Which means having MANY sample sentences which show how things fit together for all the different possible verbal roles and adjuncts. As a reference, I have used Broadwell's Choctaw Reference Grammar (2006, University of Nebraska Press) to guide me in trying to cover a broad scope of variations on sentences, especially Chapter 16.3 "Adjunct Clauses", which showed me how deficient my thinking had been as far as "how do you express this notion" in order to come up with sufficient example sentences to modestly cover all bases. Not that Choctaw is a paragon of linguistic wonder, but the organization of the grammar I thought was superb and clarified to me what a complete grammar entailed.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by Soap »

Nice to meet you. Im not that knowledgeable about linguistics; in fact Im mostly interested in this thread because I have the same question about my own primary conlang, and will pay attention to the answers to see if I can apply them as well. So I dont have much to add here.

However, I agree that in a stereotypical polysynthetic language, "toy" is not likely to be a single indivisible moirpheme, unless recent sound changes have compressed something that used to be composed of morphemes meaning something like "kids play with (it)" into a shorter word.

I think it's also likely that "determination" won't be a single morpheme either, and that you could solve your problem by taking just one piece of that word and using it as a verb instead of a noun. In English, I would analyze "You are filled with determination" as simply an emphatic form of "You are determined", and in my language I simply wouldnt bother to nominalize the word for "determination". Even the English word "determined" has one more morpheme than I would like to use, since there is no reason why a verb emphasizing a person's strong will should need to be marked with a passive participle marker like English -ed.

It might sound like a cop-out, but I dont think you really need to bother with narrow translations like that if the grammar of your language makes it difficult. If you want the added emphasis, you could think of a construction like "You are determined fully", whether the morpheme for fully is incorporated into that verb or a separate word.

Still, I suppose you might want to still have an answer for analogous situations where the word you're translating is more concrete, such as "The pitcher is filled with lemonade"? I still think you should think outside the IE-influenced box here. For my conlang I would use the verb žolpippiom, "to be full of lemonade". The morpheme breakdown of that is lemon+juice+full+PASSIVE. To use it in a sentence there would need to be an additional verb marker, so one could say

Tonwiwiž žolpippiomba.
The pitcher is full of lemonade.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by Soap »

garysk wrote:The result could be something like:

* buy-PST-3SNOM-3SACC-3SBEN DEF.ART boy INDEF.ART gun POSV.ART CAT-3SGEN

* "The boy bought a gun for his cat"

Where each argument is reflected on the verb, and the noun phrases that are the actualizations of the arguments are listed in some predetermined order after the verb.

To incorporate even more of a sentence into the verbal complex, one could:

* buy-PST-TODAY-3SNOM-3SACC-3SBEN-3SLOC DEF.ART boy INDEF.ART gun POSV.ART CAT-3SGEN DEF.ART store

* "The boy bought a gun for his cat at the store today"

This doesn't really show noun incorporation, but this could be how it is done:

* buy-PST-TODAY-3S.DEF.NOM-3S.INDEF.ACC-3S.POSV.3SGEN.BEN-3S.DEF.LOC-<boy><gun><cat><store>

* "The boy bought a gun for his cat at the store today"
If Im reading this right, this sounds like a good idea, but I bet it could be slimmed down. If you have a fixed word order, as youre proposing, you can generally assume that the first argument will be in the nominative case, and therefore not need a marker. Then you could reserve the second slot for accusative case, the third for dative/benefactive, and the fourth for locative or any other case. With those four verb markers, you could eliminate case marking on the verb entirely. For sentences like "the boy is in the store", you could use zero morphemes to fill in the ACC and BEN slots.

Incidentally, nmnmv123, does your language have pronouns? If not, have you thought up a method to distinguish four-way pair sets like "I am a teacher" vs "my teacher" vs "Im teaching" vs "my teaching(s)" ?
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by Zaarin »

Soap wrote:I bet it could be slimmed down.
That's kind of missing the point of polysynthesis. :p
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by nmnmv123 »

Soap wrote: Incidentally, nmnmv123, does your language have pronouns? If not, have you thought up a method to distinguish four-way pair sets like "I am a teacher" vs "my teacher" vs "Im teaching" vs "my teaching(s)" ?
Not yet, though I'll probably add them later (specialized for one noun in the sentence, ex one pronoun form for the subject, one for the DO, one for benefactives, etc.)- I primarily mark person through agreement on the verb - my lexicon is REALLY underdeveloped. As for distinguishing them, I do have some basic derivational morphemes, similar to the Inuit languages, along with TAM markers, so something like(taking into account changes I'll probably be adding from this thread) 1sg-teach-person-be, 1sg-teach-person-GEN, 1sg-PRES_PROG-teach, and 1sg-teach-obj-GEN (the genitive ones are a bit iffy; i'll play around with that more)

I actually do have a way of distinguishing what role the nouns play (polypersonal gender agreement marker + postfixes that attach to person markers), though it only works for subject and DO. Reserving slots was mentioned earlier on, though I'll probably also have the adpositions affix onto the verb for more redundancy(to help with parsing)

I had a full response posted to everyone's comments, but it got deleted when I got logged out and I have a bunch of hw to do now :/ so I'll probably re-type it up sometime tonight or tommorow.
Conlangs
nyokSol /njokʃol/ - WIP
Dravko /ɖaɸkɔ/ - planned
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/ɛnɛmɛnɛmˈvi/ - noobing intensifies

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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by Frislander »

garysk wrote:In the above example I invented a gloss for "this item is the object of a possessive" in the form of "POSV" (possessivized).
The Algonquian languages have a possessive theme-marker *-em- denoting alienably possessed nouns.
nmnmv123 wrote:
Soap wrote: Incidentally, nmnmv123, does your language have pronouns? If not, have you thought up a method to distinguish four-way pair sets like "I am a teacher" vs "my teacher" vs "Im teaching" vs "my teaching(s)" ?
Not yet, though I'll probably add them later (specialized for one noun in the sentence, ex one pronoun form for the subject, one for the DO, one for benefactives, etc.)- I primarily mark person through agreement on the verb - my lexicon is REALLY underdeveloped. As for distinguishing them, I do have some basic derivational morphemes, similar to the Inuit languages, along with TAM markers, so something like(taking into account changes I'll probably be adding from this thread) 1sg-teach-person-be, 1sg-teach-person-GEN, 1sg-PRES_PROG-teach, and 1sg-teach-obj-GEN (the genitive ones are a bit iffy; i'll play around with that more).
I'd probably express them more like so: 1.SUB-teach-HAB, 1.OBJ-teach-NOM, 1.SUB-teach-ONG, and I'd not have the last one because you don't actually need action nominals.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by nmnmv123 »

Soap wrote:Nice to meet you. Im not that knowledgeable about linguistics; in fact Im mostly interested in this thread because I have the same question about my own primary conlang, and will pay attention to the answers to see if I can apply them as well. So I dont have much to add here.
Lol so we're basically on the same level in terms of knowledge XD. Hope you can get something useful from here!
Soap wrote:However, I agree that in a stereotypical polysynthetic language, "toy" is not likely to be a single indivisible moirpheme, unless recent sound changes have compressed something that used to be composed of morphemes meaning something like "kids play with (it)" into a shorter word.

I think it's also likely that "determination" won't be a single morpheme either, and that you could solve your problem by taking just one piece of that word and using it as a verb instead of a noun. In English, I would analyze "You are filled with determination" as simply an emphatic form of "You are determined", and in my language I simply wouldnt bother to nominalize the word for "determination". Even the English word "determined" has one more morpheme than I would like to use, since there is no reason why a verb emphasizing a person's strong will should need to be marked with a passive participle marker like English -ed.
Good to know. So polysynthetics tend to function somewhat like oligiosynthetics in a way? As for why I treat it as a single word, primarily because my lexicon has literally 30 words, so its just kind of a place-holder for now so I dont need to make 5 new morphemes every time i want to translate something, though I guess it'll just end up impeding me later on in terms of realism, so I'll go through and re-define things when I have some time.
Soap wrote:With those four verb markers, you could eliminate case marking on the verb entirely. For sentences like "the boy is in the store", you could use zero morphemes to fill in the ACC and BEN slots.
While you could theoretically do that, it becomes really hard for the listener to understand what you're saying if they miss a single morpheme (maybe the wind was really loud, or you were too quiet). I believe someone mentioned this higher up in the thread - languages are redundant and repetitive for this exact reason, so case markings would still be pretty important as a safeguard for proper parsing of the word.
Frislander wrote:I'd probably express them more like so: 1.SUB-teach-HAB, 1.OBJ-teach-NOM, 1.SUB-teach-ONG, and I'd not have the last one because you don't actually need action nominals.
Action nominals are deriving a verb from a noun, like the Inuit languages, right? If you don't have them, then how would you handle something like the last one - 1.SUB-teach, and just have context differentiate it from the verb? Also, a little side question - what is ONG in your gloss?
garysk wrote: In regards to your "moving of cases to the verb" I wonder if this is a description for marking primary verbal arguments (subject, direct object, indirect object) and adjuncts (locationals, adverbs, sentence particles, etc) as inflections of the verb.
I do have a system of polypersonal agreement with (7) noun classes that marks which class the subject and DO are in, as well as a number affix that can distinguish S and O when they have the same class. And yea, that description is pretty accurate, the problem I'm running into is feels kind of awkward marking/incorporating other arguments, though I'm not sure if its because of english bias or because I'm doing it poorly XD

Specifically for IO, its usually(always? cant think of an example where it isnt) an oblique argument of the verb, so I have to also include the case in the verb (benefactive, adposition, etc). I'll probably end up incorporating (pun intended) what Frislander said about having a dedicated slot for both argument and its marking, though only in heavily restricted cirumstances.
Frislander wrote:2s-toy-buy-PST-3s 1s-cat

Note that the noun "cat" has lost its case marking; that it has "gone".
So, the benefactive (or whatever adposition/other case it could be) just kind of gets implied by the verb already having an incorporated noun, and inferred by context?


getting into the polysynthetic minset is hard (>_<), but thanks for all the help guys!
Conlangs
nyokSol /njokʃol/ - WIP
Dravko /ɖaɸkɔ/ - planned
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/ɛnɛmɛnɛmˈvi/ - noobing intensifies

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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by mèþru »

For my latest conlangs, I use the translations of the Leipzig–Jakarta list of words as the initial basic words. I suggest using them as a start. Many other conlangers use some edition of the 100 or 200 Swadesh list.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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nmnmv123 wrote:I do have a system of polypersonal agreement with (7) noun classes that marks which class the subject and DO are in, as well as a number affix that can distinguish S and O when they have the same class. And yea, that description is pretty accurate, the problem I'm running into is feels kind of awkward marking/incorporating other arguments, though I'm not sure if its because of english bias or because I'm doing it poorly XD
It should be noted that often INs are of a reduced form of the independent noun, likewise not uncommon is for the IN to be a completely different lexeme of unrelated origin. Abbreviating the IN will make your words shorter, and will likewise help emphasize their role as old or incidental information, whereas the independent noun serves as a topicalizer to introduce a new facet of the discourse. (I think that "topicalizer" is the right word here). And after that introduction, the noun is incorporated where allowed to mark it as old information.

I must heartily recommend the Mithun paper that Frislander mentioned, definitely an eye opener for me on the subject of NI. You can skip searching through the lengthy bibliography by going directly to the PDF at The Evolution of Noun Incorporation. Vidently there's a science to this NI business.

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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by mèþru »

Slots are really the key to any inflecting verbal system.
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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mèþru wrote:Slots are really the key to any inflecting verbal system.
True for PS and agglutinating languages, only marginally and inconsistently true for fusional languages. That's why they're fusional.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by Soap »

I know your conlang is in its early stages just yet, but you might want to think about sound changes if you decide to go with the method of using reduced forms of nouns as incorporated morphemes on verbs.

For example suppose you have a noun tabo "thing held onto, handheld object". Perhaps it could be originally the word for plum until the speakers moved into an area in wich plum trees did not grow, and evolved a new lexical meaning. Then suppose you have universal word-initial stress. Then suppose there is a sound change that deletes /b/ when overlaying two unstressed syllables. Then the incorporated form of the word would be tao.

But then suppose that the speakers dont like low+low vowel sequences like /ao/, and turn it into /io/ (think of enlgish "karaoke"). Then you have a word /tio/ as the incorporated form of /tabo/. Next up you could compress this into /tšo/, which might coolide with incorps of other words but nevertheless still be distinct enough to be understood by the speakers.

Thus your language has incorpts that seem at first to be unrelated, or only distantly related, to the words they derive from, since none of the above sound changes applied to the free form of the word /tabo/. Young speakers of the language might not even realize the connection, they just pick it up as if /tšo/ were a word of its own that occurs only as an incorp. This I think is similar to the systems in use in many polysynethetic natural languages today.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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@soap & @nmnmv123: of course sound changes! I thought that went without saying. When I said reduced/abbreviated, I meant phonologically reduced. And if one looks at an athabaskan grammar, they sometimes show a grand chart of all the verbal slots, showing all sorts of interdependencies and variations, showing the results of diachronic changes (and of course other developments).

An important point that Methun makes about INs is this: You can tell that the noun is not simply juxtaposed on the verb complex if it has been subjected to phonological developments that can occur only within a morpheme; if internal changes are not reflected in the compound, then the noun is really just juxtaposed, and may show sound changes that are germane only to word margins. And of course this applies to all the components of an utterance, so one can see (if not erased by too many changes) that various components have undergone word-initial, word-medial, or word-final changes (and the whole gamut of other phonological developments), and where two components abutt, and there are word-medial changes, then you know that the speakers were treating the two as a single unit.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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As for the sound changes, thanks to everyone that brought it up - another point I'll be adding. For the reduction, I'll be using a searchable version of the index diachronica, along with some syllable merging and (TBD) vowel changes (if any future readers need this for reference)
garysk wrote:
mèþru wrote:Slots are really the key to any inflecting verbal system.
True for PS and agglutinating languages, only marginally and inconsistently true for fusional languages. That's why they're fusional.
While my language is pretty fusional for most affixes (usually 2 concepts per inflectional morpheme), the actual putting together of the verb is purely agglutinative. Hardcore fusion (looking at you German ablaut and Semitic triconsonantal roots) terrifies me, especially in the context of a 10+ morpheme word (ambiguity and super complex phonological changes are scary XD)
Conlangs
nyokSol /njokʃol/ - WIP
Dravko /ɖaɸkɔ/ - planned
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/ɛnɛmɛnɛmˈvi/ - noobing intensifies

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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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nmnmv123 wrote:Hardcore fusion (looking at you German ablaut and Semitic triconsonantal roots) terrifies me, especially in the context of a 10+ morpheme word
Mwahahaha! Ablaut, aka vowel harmony, happens in a many of the PS American languages. If you want polysynthesism, you must pay the price, mortal, or go back to Esperanto! Mwahahaha!

Besides, what happens to your stressed syllables when you tack on 10 affixes? That's right, the stress is going to be inclined to move, and we all know what changing stress does to vowels. Mwahahaha!
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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garysk wrote:
nmnmv123 wrote:Hardcore fusion (looking at you German ablaut and Semitic triconsonantal roots) terrifies me, especially in the context of a 10+ morpheme word
Mwahahaha! Ablaut, aka vowel harmony, happens in a many of the PS American languages. If you want polysynthesism, you must pay the price, mortal, or go back to Esperanto! Mwahahaha!

Besides, what happens to your stressed syllables when you tack on 10 affixes? That's right, the stress is going to be inclined to move, and we all know what changing stress does to vowels. Mwahahaha!
Ablaut is not the same thing as vowel harmony--but yes, both can be found in Native American languages.
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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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Umlaut is essentially vowel harmony, not ablaut.

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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

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garysk wrote:
nmnmv123 wrote:Hardcore fusion (looking at you German ablaut and Semitic triconsonantal roots) terrifies me, especially in the context of a 10+ morpheme word
Mwahahaha! Ablaut, aka vowel harmony, happens in a many of the PS American languages. If you want polysynthesism, you must pay the price, mortal, or go back to Esperanto! Mwahahaha!

Besides, what happens to your stressed syllables when you tack on 10 affixes? That's right, the stress is going to be inclined to move, and we all know what changing stress does to vowels. Mwahahaha!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Now on to business: ablaut is grammatical vowel changing, ex: sing sang sung song - the different vowel in the middle determines different grammatical properties. Vowel harmony on the other hand, is NOT phonemic - it just changes how things sound, ex: all unrounded vowels changing to rounded when the first syllable of the stem is rounded, and vice versa. If you mess up with a vowel harmony system, it'll sound weird and you might not get understood, but grammatically you havent changed anything about the sentence, you simply miss pronounced it. Messing up an ablaut system, however, changes the grammar of the system.
Conlangs
nyokSol /njokʃol/ - WIP
Dravko /ɖaɸkɔ/ - planned
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/ɛnɛmɛnɛmˈvi/ - noobing intensifies

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Re: Noun incorporation and applicative voice question

Post by mèþru »

Vowel harmony can be phonemic.
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
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