Thursday, June 4, 2015

Detail #167: A musing on noun morphology

Sometimes, languages have different combinations of things in different parts of the verbal paradigm. For instance, the Russian past tense verb has congruence for gender, but does not mark person in any way. Meanwhile, the Russian present tense verb marks person - but does not mark gender in any way.

Is there perchance some way of conflating marking in some clever way in the nominal morphology? Obviously we could go for a very simple solution - have core cases distinguish gender in their morphology while non-core cases don't. However, this is only maybe the most obvious such conflation.

Let's go a bit further afield and try to come up with something a bit weirder. How about ... case, definiteness and number marking gets lost on nouns whenever they are possessed and whenever they are possessors. (Note: I assume this conlang uses case a bit like German or Ancient Greek, so not too excessively over-reliant on it.) However, when possessed, there's an explicit gender prefix as well as a prefix that codes for whether the possessor is the noun higher or lower in the animacy hierarchy (possession is done by simple apposition, and both orders go). For arguments that are not preceded by a preposition, this also triggers the presence of inverse marking on the verb.

Conclusion to the post: not a very good idea, and not as interesting really as the Russian verbal split. It seems things along the line of the Russian split are easy to come up with for verbs (just replace categories that trigger some agreement or under which some other category is permitted - i.e. have negative verbs not distinguish realis and irrealis, or have the future tense merge some aspects or whatever, etc) than it is for nouns (I've been trying to come up with something more clever for days!)

So this is a bit of a challenge as well – please, come up with something better!

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