Detail #161: Shapes

In Newmeyer's Possible and Probable Languages, Newmeyer lists a bunch of implicational universals. They're not listed as in any way necessarily absolute or anything. Now, we're not going to discuss the validity of universals or anything, but rather see what conlanging-ideas we could derive from them. I will now discuss the

"In every language in which the property concept of shape is expressed through adjectives, then those of color and size are also expressed through adjectives (Dixon 1977; TUA #141)." (Newmeyer, p. 5)

This opens the question of course as to what other ways of expressing shape exist. There's a few obvious alternatives: adpositional/case attributes, i.e. the property is expressed somewhat comparably to these English phrases, both somewhat 'off':

a man of rotundity, a face of angles : a rotund man, an angular face

 Now, such prepositional phrases could easily be used directly as complements of copulas:

the man is of rotundity

However, it could also be used in some other way:

the face has many angles

However, let's get a bit wilder, shall we? How about shape being encoded as a set of optional derivational suffixes similar to, say, diminutives in how they're applied.

man-rotund-[number]-[case]
face-angular-[number]-[case]
stick-bent-[number]-[case]

For the predicative sense, let's derive verbs in some special ways, or use some kind of dummy noun with the suffix. All suffixes may not have verbal versions.


Bibliography:
Newmeyer, Frederick J., Possible and Probable Languages - A Generative Perspective on Linguistic Typology, Oxford University Press, 2005