Detail #140: A Link and riffing on its contents

Aszev wrote, some time ago, a pretty good summary and introduction to systems of answering polar questions. It is a good read, and really condenses the matter very efficiently.

What could be some fun way of going slightly beyond this? We could of course try to come up with some 'new' table not present in the typology offered by Aszev.

1) Right-left flip on the Three-Form System
Conflate positive answers to negative and positive questions, distinguish negative answers to negative vs. positive questions. An obvious extension. Why it doesn't seem to be attested surprises me a bit. This is a three-way system mirrored left-right.

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes	nay
neg?	yes	nope

2) Pseudodiagonal Languages
The agreement system gives a nice diagonal system.

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes	no
neg?	no	yes

But we could obviously make one of the diagonals not conform to letting it be diagonal.

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes	no
neg?	no	nope

Or alternatively make one of the nos deviate.

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes	no
neg?	nope	yes

3) Doing other things with this:
We could imagine a language that takes two types of this, and basically marks for both. Of course, let's not have the marking have similar exponents at all!

We take an agreement system (and apply that to presence of person inflections on the verb, for instance), and a negation particle that follows the English two-form system:

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes, congruence	no, no congruence
neg?	yes, no congruence	no, congruence

We could maybe use some other exponent for this, who knows? Maybe the things I currently mark 'no congruence' get a peculiar subject case? Or maybe something like:

	pos!	neg!
pos?	yes, verb	no, did not verb
neg?	yes, did verb	no, not verb

There's endless possibilities. Of course, these will interact with other negation in general, and possibly one might want to use some of these as negation (or affirmation)-approaches in other circumstances. Maybe the markings given by the neg?-pos! cell encodes a strong affirmation, pos?-pos! encodes a reaffirmation, neg?-neg! a strong negation, pos?-neg! something else, so there's use for this outside of the slightly limited context of polar questions.

We could of course combine some other systems in some neat ways like this as well.