zompist bboard

Leþwin is a polysynthetic language with a proclivity to have heavily inflected verbs and a more austere nominal system. I've been trying to work out a system that falls in line with Leþwini structure and can still articulate what a language should.

My primary problem is based on the templatic structure of the verb.

The structure is something like:
[I][II][III]{IIa}{IIIa}[R0][R1][VI][V][VI]

I: Modality & Evidential Prefixes
II: Deictics & Determiners
III: Pronomial Prefixes & Classificatory Distinctions
IIa: Deictic & Determiner Agreement Markers
IIIa: Pronomial & Class Agreement Markers
R0: Incorporated Noun
R1: Verb Root
IV: Lexical Suffixes
V: Adverbial Suffixes & Various Derivational Suffixes
VI: Aspect & Tense Suffixes

Most verbs don't contain all these dimensions, primarily the suffixes contain all the inflectional information while the suffixes contain derivational info (with the exception of the aspect and tense suffix.

The II and III slots are actually fusional, with class and pronouns conflated with deictic anaphora and determiners. Below is a chart listing the possible combinations.



And while I am still working on the actual affixes now, this is the chart listing all possible fusional prefixes. I should go over what the classes mean, and what I specifically mean by my anaphora/determiners.

Class I: Large Objects; buildings, boulders, landforms, toponyms et cetera.
Class II: Small Objects; pebbles, berries, buttons et cetera
Class III: Compact Objects; tools, weapons, clothing, any easily hand held object
Class IV: Long Objects; switch, branch, trail, sword, spear, arm et cetera
Class V: Animate (Beings); humans, other sentient beings, fire, wind, animals
Class VI: Inanimate (Beings); mussels, rope, marginally active beings, sleeping animals, dead beings et cetera
Class VII: Liquids/Resins; liquids, gels, resins, sap, anything that can range from thin fluids to viscous substance
Class VIII: Debris; ash, broken glass, sand, metal shavings, rubble, broken animal bones et cetera
Class IX: Containers; travel sacks, animal bladder containers, rigid containers (tins) et cetera
Class X: "Subjective Phenomena": thoughts, feelings, senses, properties of the mind and soul
Class XI: "Objective Phenomena": sunlight, air, the forces of the universe et cetera
(I use quotation marks because this is certainly not the terminology that Leþwini speakers would use)

1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Persons is straightforward enough, there is no number or gender distinction made in personal pronouns. (In order to indicate things like "we" you can say 1st person and 2nd person, or 1st and 3rd or 1st and 4th, there is a more sophisticated method for indicating group relationships but that can be saved for the noun section of my morphology.

Immediate Anaphora: indicates that the anaphor is at hand, touching the speaker or within arms reach
Proximal Anaphora: this dimension is a bit more complicated as it scales with the surroundings, in an open field it would be within a few strides of a person, or easy talking at the beginning edge of shouting distance. In a room, it scales down relative to the size of the room, for instance the other side of a room would be considered the area of Distal Anaphora even in relatively small rooms. Which brings us to...
Distal Anaphora: this dimension also scales with it's surroundings, in an open environment such as a field the front edge of this dimension is at shouting distance with it's far edge being that of the end of visual range.
Restricted Anaphora: as things are not as always clear cut as "near" and "far" we come to a much used dimension which indicates that either the entirety of the object is obscured or only part of it is visible. This can be used in many contexts, in forests where things are obscured by trees, in crowded environments, in navigation, and so forth.
Imperceptive (Hypothetical) Anaphora: this indicates that the anaphor is so far away it's not apparent, either separated in time or space, or separated in reality (i.e. the hypothetical contexts).
Existential Anaphora: indicates simple existence without reference to it's position to the speaker.
Negative Anaphora: indicates absence of anaphora.

Are my gaps reasonable? (i.e. without a proper Disjunctive Determiners, Alternative Determiners, Degree Determiners or Elective Determiners)

I have planned for the gaps in certain instances except for those listed above.

Besides my issues with determiners I was also going to pose a question of redundancy. While Leþwin uses noun incorporation rather heavily it also uses lexical affixes. Suffixes which in other languages would be taken as nouns, verbs, adverbs or adjectives. I couldn't find a specific example of languages which use both. I did look through The Languages of Native North America, and it mentions noun incorporation separately from lexical affixes, so I'm not sure if I'm overdoing it. I'm just trying to lay the groundwork for a language which will be fluid, and highly expressive as well as being capable of highly specific utterances.

I'll post some more in regards to the specifics of grammar, and I ought to have the graph filled out with the actual fusional prefixes.

_________________
From:
Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69

To:
Economic Left/Right: -6.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

So it's probably verb-initial.



You left out IV and put VI in twice.
I'm betting you meant
[I][II][III]{IIa}{IIIa}[R0][R1][IV][V][VI]

(Could you also have meant [IIa] and [IIIa] instead of {IIa} and {IIIa}?)



Isn't using capital Roman numerals both for template slots and for noun-classes likely to cause notational confusions for your readers?



Interesting! And impressive!



In my possibly underinformed opinion, why the heck not?



The following facts or approximate facts or opinions might relate to your questions at least obliquely:

1. I don't see why you distinguish slots [II] from {IIa} nor slots [III] from {IIIa}. Why aren't all "pronominal-and-class" markers "agreement" markers? Why aren't all "deixis and determiner" markers "agreement" markers?
2. In most languages that very-productively incorporate specific/referential nouns into verbs,
   1. the incorporated noun is almost always a patient (an object)
   2. usually only the root of the noun is incorporated
   3. so things like definiteness, deixis, and number, and possibly other "determiner" semantic (and pragmatic and grammatic) data, aren't ordinarily included in what's incorporated into the verb along with the noun
3. your "pronominal and class (agreement) markers" seem, to me, more real-natlang-istic than your "deictic and determiner (agreement) markers"
4. I wonder whether your II and IIa and III and IIIa markers are polypersonal? Do they tell about the other participants, such as the subject and/or the indirect object?
5. I wonder whether your II and IIa and III and IIIa markers are silent about those participants which happen to be indefinite instead of definite?

I really look forward to seeing more.
I want to see your solutions to your problems, whether or not "being like natlangs" is fully satisfied by the eventual solution.

That it is.


I did intend to write IV and VI not VI and VI.

And I did mean to put in IIa and IIIa, but to your point (further down in the text) I got confused about what exactly is meant by those distinctions, so when I repost the template I will get rid of the IIa & IIIa, since they are synonymous with II and III.



Why Yes, I believe it probably would be a bit confusing. I'll change the template to be Roman letters as opposed to numerals.




Why thank you, those were my favorite parts too.



Yeah, the point about the "agreement markers", the point I mentioned earlier will be changed.

As far as the deixis and determiner thing, they are agreement markers, for instance if I'm talking about holding a knife

And I didn't think of it until now but my thinking on noun incorporation was muddied mostly by my inability to consistently place the grammatical role of the noun in the incorporated word. Now that I'm aware of incorporated nouns being in the patient case it makes things a mite bit easier to comprehend. Which is perfect anyway, because the Patient Case is the unmarked one anyway. Leþwin is an Active language, and has Patient, Volitional Agent and General Agent cases to denote the grammatical role of the noun. But again, I suppose that is another post.

I never really thought about polypersonal marking, but I'll have to. Maybe I'll use it, it'll make for a great degree of coordinated chaos in the language.

As far as definiteness/indefiniteness is concerned, I'm a little hazy on the details. Are we talking about the distinction between "the man did it/a man did it/some man did it"? that sort of distinction?



Thank you! That's really encouraging to hear. I've spent so much time, too much time, scrapping and rescrapping my ideas, and I thought it was about time to consult the board for help.

And now here is the tweaked template:

[A][B][C][R0][R1][D][E][F]
A: Modality/Evidentiality Prefixes
B: Deictic/Determiner Prefixes & C: Pronomial Prefixes & Class Prefixes
R0: Incorported Noun Root
R1: Verb Root
D: Lexical Suffixes
E: Adverbials & Other Various Derivational Suffixes
F: Tense & Aspect Suffixes

There are a few points I should go over. First, use of the entire template - having a prefix and suffix for each category - is a rarity. In fact, I'm not sure that it'd be done at all.

It is important to note what each slot in the template is used for and from that it would make it easier to understand when it would be appropriate to use that given category.

A: Modality and Evidentiality Prefixes are common to all verbs, they are mandatorily inflected. I'll post a list later on.
B: Deictics and Determiner Prefixes and C: Pronomial Preixes & Class Prefixes are agreement markers indicating which volitional agent, general agent, and patient are involved in the act, how close they are and their class, B & C actually form a fusional single prefix but I prefer to analyze them separately. I'm still playing around with the idea of the polypersonal agreement too so that may need to get a slot.
R0: The Incorporated Noun Root, which is patient in the process. This simply detransitivizes (is that even a word?) the verb in question.
R1: Verb Root, the core bit if information from which we derive all possible verb formations.
D: Lexical Suffixes, these suffixes are more root like than the other derivational suffixes, and this category specifically is comprised of a couple hundred suffixes. These suffixes, though containing root-like meanings have more general connotations than their root counterparts (i.e. q'ɒ̰: is a root which means "mouth", and the lexical suffix -ɒqtɬʰ, can mean not only "mouth" but has more generalized and flexible semantics to it, it can approximately mean "cusp, edge, lip, tongue, speak, speech, eat, food, well (n.), hole". Essentially the Lexical Suffixes are just a subset of Derivational Suffixes which are root-like, but can not stand alone as free words.
E.Derivational Suffixes, these are suffixes which are not Lexical Suffixes and alter the meaning of the verb. I need some more time to flesh this out.
F.Aspect & Tense Suffixes, the only inflectional suffixes in Leþwin. I've been trying to figure out what sort of a system I want for this, originally it was heavy on aspects and light on tense, and then I was looking into some Native American systems which are opposite, generally with many past tenses, I'm currently looking at some Algonquin languages for some inspiration but who knows where it'll end up. I digress though.

So when I have another few hours I'll work on putting up some serious revisions. Thank you.

_________________
From:
Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69

To:
Economic Left/Right: -6.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

You're very welcome!



It looks like I might have helped! Good! And thanks for letting me know.



Sort of.

A use of a noun is a specific or referential use, if the speaker has a particular (specific) one or ones in mind that s/he is talking about (referring to).
A use of a noun is definite if it is specific/referential and the speaker expects, with some reason and probably correctly, that the addressee knows which one(s) the speaker is referring to.

(So it's possible for a use of a noun to be indefinite and yet still be specific/referential. But definite implies specific/referential and nonspecific/nonreferential implies indefinite.)

Lots of natural languages mark specificity/referentiality, but not definiteness; lots mark definiteness, but not specificity/referentiality.

English has a definite article ("the") to mark definiteness and an indefinite article ("an" or "a") which may mark something else as well but certainly markes indefiniteness because it can be used only on indefinite uses of nouns. English doesn't have any specific/referential article nor any nonspecific/nonreferential article.

Most languages allow incorporation of nonspecific/nonreferential patient-objects into verbs. Being able to incorporate nouns used specifically/referentially is a much less usual thing.



I'm glad of that!



I'm glad you did.



Oh, yes. "Detransitivize" is a word. And it's reasonable to view incorporating the patient into the verb as producing a new verb that has lower valency and is intransitive; that view is taken, at least sometimes, by academic linguists who work on such languages.



"Adverbial" morphemes get included in verbs a lot, especially in polysynthetic languages.

Polysynthetic languages often (usually?) don't have (many) adjectives; what's an adjective in some other language is likely either to be a special kind of verb or a special kind of noun. Including "adjectival" morphemes in your verb-template is, (unless I'm wrong -- and I might be -- ), not how polysynthetic natlangs usually handle things. Instead your "adjectival morpheme" probably should either be another verb-root, or should be a noun, or should be part of your noun-template. And I think you've said you want to keep your noun-templates simple.

Algonquian languages' "medial" might do as natlang models both for the "nominal" D and E suffixes and for the E "Derivational suffixes" in general.

Algonquian verbs (? perhaps other parts-of-speech also, or instead?) consist of a mandatory Initial, usually an optional Final, and provided there is a final sometimes an optional Medial. These are not quite words and not quite morphemes but are something more than syllables or sound-clusters.

The set of Initials is productive and open; new ones are being made all the time, and sometimes an existing word becomes the Initial of a new word.

The set of Finals is smaller and more fixed. Finals are more like inflectional suffixes than like derivational ones; their effect on the meaning is rather predictable and transparent and straightforward and regular and all that neat stuff. Most initials can be used with any final, and most finals can be used with any initial; that is, finals tend to be productive as well as regular.

The set of Medials is smaller yet and more fixed yet.
Lots of Medials seem to be derived from body-part nouns. That's why I thought they could be models for your noun-like Lexical Suffixes and your noun-like Derivational Suffixes.
Many medials can be used only with certain initials (though IIRC those can be used with most finals); many can be used only with certain finals (though IIRC those can be used with most initials). So medials have limited productivity, especially compared to initials and finals.
Medials are more like derivational morphemes than like inflexional ones, as I'll explain in a bit; so that's why I thought they'd be a good model for your Derivational Suffixes.
Medials' effect on the meaning is often a bit idiosyncratic. How they change the meaning with one initial is not necessarily a reliable guide to how the change the meaning with another initial. And similarly, how a medial changes the meaning when used with one final is not necessarily a reliable guide for how it changes the meaning when combined with some other final.



OK, so, you've already run into Algonquian languages, and other Native North American languages with that "Initial-Medial-Final" word-form. Good.



Thank you right back!

In many languages, English among them, there is such a thing as "subject incorporation" or "agent incorporation".

Examples:
henpecked
manmade
motheaten
snakebitten
doctor-recommended
government-issued
signal-controlled

(The incorporated agent is almost never definite and is usually nonspecific/nonreferential.)
But "subject/agent incorporation" is usually less productive than "object/patient incorporation" and usually does not result in a "full" (that is, non-defective) verb.

English's agent-incorporated verbs, for instance, normally (always?) have only passive-participle forms. The above examples as far as I know only occur as passive participles.

Yes. If you said "a snakebiting contest" it would a competition of people biting snakes, but "a snake biting contest" (where "snake" is not incorporated to the verb) it'd be a competition of snakes biting things.

Good illustrations! Thanks.

So I'm currently tooling around with the Tense system and I've decided I wanted a fairly minimal system. I was originally going to use a Past/Non-Past Distinction. I'm still debating on doing it that way or having a Non-Remembered Past Tense for all those things which took place before my subjective recollection and Remembered Past Tense for all those things which happened during my life.

Well that was the plan anyway, until I thought of the murkiness that would bring to the language. If something happened in the last year let's say, but I didn't see it happen, would I retell the action in the remembered or the non-remembered past tense? And as one gets older the window for the remembered past tense would shrink.

So perhaps I'll have it based on lifetime. I don't know what to do really. This is sort of just rambling, but it helps to just type it out. And while this post probably belongs on the C&C Quickies section I figured it could just hop onto my current thread since it pertains to the same language and structure. Anyway, I'm thinking I'll be using relative tense, but how I'll implement it exactly seems to be the problem.

Anyway... end rant.

_________________
From:
Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69

To:
Economic Left/Right: -6.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

And I almost forgot to say thanks for giving me these examples. I'm still trying to work out the situations in which I'll use noun incorporation. Leþwin is an Active Language, and has five grammatical cases: Volitional Agent, General Agent, Patient, Instrumental/Comitative and Essive. I was figuring primarily using patient incorporation, general agent and volitional agent but I don't think I can conceive a reason to incorporate an instrumental/comitative or an essive into that sort of a construction.

Would agent incorporation necessitate the verb to be transitive by the way?

_________________
From:
Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69

To:
Economic Left/Right: -6.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

You're welcome!



Comitative, maybe not; but I can see putting an instrument in just as easily as an agent.
Consider "hammer-dented" or "machine-wrung" or "nail-pocked".
[EDIT]: better, "bladecut" or "machine-washed". [/EDIT]



The best answer I can give is not extremely simple.

First: I don't see why that would necessarily be so. As long as there's an agent at all, FAIK it might be possible to incorporate it. But I don't know of any examples.

[EDIT]: 1.5th: If you incorporated the agent into a monovalent verb, with the result that you got a new, non-defective verb that could take a finite form, the resulting new verb would be zero-valent; it would have no arguments. What would you want to say with such a verb? Maybe "Windblows"? But then why not "The wind is blowing" or "The weather is windy"? I think it might be you'd have some use for it, but it strains my creativity to think of one at the moment. [/EDIT]

Second: The verb does have to be transitive in order to have a passive participle; so, in English, or any other language where agent-incorporated verbs only occur as passive participles, such verbs must be transitive. I don't know of any languages in which agent-incorporation results in a mostly non-defective verb (a verb that can be conjugated through almost the language's entire verb-paradigm).

Third: In order to incorporate a patient into a verb, the verb ("before" the incorporation) must have a patient; so it must be transitive ("before" the incorporation). Incorporating the patient produces a new verb whose valency is less by one; the new verb "doesn't have a patient" (because that's part of the verb now, instead of a separate noun or noun-phrase).

Alright, so I've tweaked the structure yet again, in order to accommodate easier speaking and understanding. Below is the new template, just a slightly altered form of the last.

[Mood/Evidentiality][Tense][Aspect][Polypersonal Marking][Noun Stem][Classificatory Marking][Verb Root][Derivational Suffixes]

So, I've shifted to a more predominantly suffixing structure than before. The only suffixes are those which are derivational. Initially the mood/evidentiality markers indicate the reality and epistemic qualities of the act. Tense is separate from aspect being marked with a simple past marker or a non-past null-inflection. The aspect prefixes (which differ in type and number depending on whether the verb root is considered to be stative, active, locomotional/locative. Polypersonal marking I think is important to indicate the roles of those involved. There is a hierarchy in which the markers are displayed as well depending on their inherent relative importance to the speaker thus: 1st person < 2nd person < 3rd persons & immediate and proximal deictics < 4th persons & distal, imperceptive and restricted deictics. These are just the markers indicating the participants involved, there would be no need for me to say, indicate their grammatical case into the polypersonal markers would there? I figure I could leave that to the inflection on the noun itself.

The Noun Stem of course is that of the incorporated noun if it applies at all it's uninflected. The only thing that still confuses me, even after all TomHChappell's patience is that since I conjugate my nouns for agency and patiency, specifically volitional agent, general agent and [b]patient[b] and since Leþwin is a Fluid-S type of Active language, the speaker decides where to assign the volitional agent, general agent or patient. So with all this flexibility and without any inflection on the incorporated noun, how does the incorporated noun with the verb root indicate lets say an volitional agentive construction versus a general agentive or patientive construction? All notions of patiency or agency would be connotative instead of denotative right?

Anyway, besides my misconceptions and issues with noun incorporation...

We come to classificatory marking, which is used only in instances where the animacy, shape, consistency or abstract/concrete nature matter in handing the nouns involved in the act/state/process/movement. This is intimately tied into the verb root, typically with a high amount of mutation of initial consonants (if the verb root has a consonantal onset). This obfuscates the division between root and class marker. Essentially Leþwini speakers view (let's say) holding a rope as a distinctly different act then holding a baby, and thus the intimate combination of class and verb root reflect that. As was mentioned though this occurs typically in verbs of motion, handling, throwing, catching, location, and for the abstract classes, in cases where the subjective or objective nature of the nouns involved matters.

Lastly, suffixed to the verb root, any derivational morphology. This includes everything from simple derivational morphology to lexemic suffixes.

More details to still be worked out but I am happy with the shape of the template.

_________________
From:
Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69

To:
Economic Left/Right: -6.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

I read your last post and want to respond to it but I'm running out of time so it will have to be tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.
I will say I like a lot of it.