Saturday, October 18, 2014

Detail #107: Fun with Verb-like Adjectives

Many conlangers get rid of adjectives in one way or another - basically, it is an easy way of adding some level of exoticness, since adjectives as a word class are omnipresent throughout Europe. Thus, conflating them with verbs or with nouns is an easy way of avoiding Standard Average Europeanness. A few languages that fall within SAE range conflate nouns and adjectives, which might be why this option is less often talked about.

There are, of course, two ways of going about this: one is the hardcore way that genuinely utterly conflates verbs and adjectives. At this point, the only difference may be a slight statistical difference - some verbs may be used as attributes more often than others, whereas some might even be almost exclusively used as predicates. The other way is to maintain some kind of slight distinction - adjectives are a subclass of verbs that might have some syntactical and morphological peculiarities to them.

However, most constructed languages fall short there - the grammar asserts adjectives behave like verbs, and that is what we get. We get to know how to use verbs as attributes and as predicates, maybe a few bits about comparison and how to intensify verbs, etc.

However, from the descriptions we get, I am generally left with the feeling that this in a way is window dressing - we still end up using the verb that corresponds to 'red' in a way that closely corresponds to how we use the adjective 'red' in English. What if we could do some violence to the structural similarities, what if we could force some innovative phrasings and ways of structuring an utterance.

An example could be one of the early posts in this blog - 'X has adj Y'  'X adj.pres Y', although you might want to introduce some voice morphology or somesuch. 'X has a red house' → 'X red.voice house'. What happens if there's more than one adjective? "X reds and bigs his house", with the same markings on the verbs, naturally. Normally adjectives will be intransitive (although this needn't be the case, necessarily - some adjectives, like 'fearful (of)', 'bored (with)', might very well turn out to be transitive in some languages, even if that language has a distinct class of adjectives!), so a transitive use could, for some verbs (or even some 'verbs with adjective tendencies') indicate something like 'having an X of the quality the verb expresses'.

What other things could this conflation lead to? I guess one thing could be rephrasings when several of the nouns in an NP share adjectives: the old woman helped the old man → old.3pl, the woman helped the man.

I sort of feel like there could be greater difference in how stuff is pragmatically structured - like a genuine, well-thought out lack of adjectives should have a greater impact on information structure than what conlangs actually deliver.

I suggest this post be read as a pointer rather than a criticism - here are some things to think about, where little work has been done. If you want to break ground, this is one place you can do so. I realize this is a tricky thing to think about - I wanted to come up with way better examples than I managed to, but I am pretty sure I am not the most imaginative conlanger out there, and conlanging should be a way of practicing your imagination anyway!

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