Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Detail #31: Pronouns doubling as particles

Certain pronouns - especially indefinite ones - lend themselves easily to adverbial uses as well, c.f. how some languages do not distinguish "not" from "no, none". (Example: Swedish dialects in southwest Finland use 'inga' for basically all negation, thus having the same negation in "I didn't see you" and "No car is fast enough". )

Somewhat inconsistently, dialects of Swedish also use 'all' to denote completion (and by extension, wearing out, lacking and running out: bɪɭɪn jä all - the car is worn out, mjöɭt͡ʃen jä al: - IMD at least usually used to say something like 'well, that was the last of the milk!'. The pronoun has gender marking in congruence with the noun. This is basically only used with all as a complement - a rather restrictive use. How about constructing a whole perfect/perfective/telic(?) aspect using all as the morpheme/particle marking it? I'd presume this use would not have congruence with anything (or whatever form the pronoun takes would be influenced by whatever.)

Certainly, of course, something along the lines of some could easily be an explicit marker for slightly intensifying a imperfect/imperfective verb. Do keep in mind that different languages of course may have different sets of indefinite and definite pronouns (outside of the basic personal pronouns), there's no guarantee that 'some' will have a perfect match.

'who, which, that, ..' (relativizers): questions like "Who built this?" could easily get an increasingly grammaticalized answer like "it's John who [built it]", where "who [built it]" slowly is reduced to just an intransitive relativizer. This would end up increasingly like some kind of definite article restricted to only some contexts, such as answering questions, contrastive statements ("... but it was really he who."), etc. (Reminds me of lambdas in programming, for some reason).

Just some ideas that could be developed, and probably are rather close to what actually may have happened in some natural languages.

Coming up at some point in the next weeks: a consideration of pragmatics in conlangs.

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