Questions for a Conlang Grammar

 Here's a few questions for any conlanger who doesn't know where to go with his grammar.

• How do the tenses work?
• What tense would you use in a question such as 'how long have you lived here', in case the person still is living there? In e.g. Russian, it's the imperfective present. NB: Russian imperfective present is non-future with possible extension into the past.
• How would you, or would you even, distinguish different spans depending on whether the end- and starting-points are included or not, whether they are both in the past, both in the future, starting-point in the past, or either one happens to be the present?
• Does tense/mood/aspect/polarity/evidentiality/... ever 'raise' to the main verb of a surrounding clause? Is this restricted only to some verbs?
  
• How do moods work?
• When would you use which mood? Do conditionals require extra marking for the apodosis and protasis, or is the verb mood itself sufficient? Do moods influence word order (or is word order even the sole marker?)
  
• How does deference work? Special pronouns or filler vocatives? Special verb forms? Special phrasing?
• How do you resolve third person pronoun reference?
• This doesn't even have to have an unambiguous strategy, most real languages probably have no single resolution strategy for this.
• This doesn't prevent people from thinking such a strategy exists in their language, e.g. "the most recent third person subject of the same gender and/or number as the pronoun in a previous clause or subclause" is popularly believed by Swedish grammar nazis, but when you point out when they themselves deviate from this rule, they always have some ad hoc explanation, not realizing that this ad hoccery just goes to show that their rule is incomplete.
• Are there ways of affecting the resolution strategy a listener will use by changing some details?
  
• How do relative subclauses work?
• Are they entirely replaced by participles and the like?
• Do you have dedicated participles for each tense/mood/aspect, and
• for each possible relativizeable role? (E.g. "the man to whom you gave a pineapple" > the from you a pineapple to-given man?")
• How much of the accessibility hierarchy are you going to cover? 
• Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparative (replace Subject and Dir Obj with Abs > Erg for ergative langs)
• This means 'if you can express 'the man whose car was stolen' using a relativizer that expresses the genitive relation, then you should also be able to say 'the man with whom I was guarding the treasure', but not necessarily 'the man than who I am taller'.
• Those parts of the hierarchy that you exclude, how would you express the same sentiment?
  
• Can all nouns in a clause have a relative subclause follow them?
• Can relative subclauses stand by themselves?
• i.e. can you have things like 'whosoever can help, speak up'? 
• Do relative subclauses have a special word order?
• Do relative subclauses have a specific alignment? (Not entirely unusual in split-ergative languages) 
• Can relative subclauses be discontinuous?
• Is there adposition stranding (c.f. 'the house which I waited in') - unusual globally, but not unknown outside of north Germanic and a few examples in west Germanic.
• Do you have resumptive pronouns ('the man who I know his wife')
• Even if you don't have them in the typical relative subclause, do they appear in more complicated, embedded subclauses?
• Can you have a subclause where the outermost relative subclause actually doesn't assign the relativized noun a role?
• "The man who they told me about a time when he stole a car from a moving train"
  
• How do other subclauses work?
  
• How does comparison work?
• See the different types here: https://wals.info/chapter/121
• Can other things beyond adjectives and adverbs be compared - e.g. locative cases or adpositions ('closer to'), instrumental cases or adpositions ('with greater strength'), nouns ('more of a substance', 'a thing of greater size')
• How do you do "cross-cutting comparisons" ("he can run faster than they can pursue me")
• Can superlatives be indefinite? If yes, is this restricted to a few specific phrases? (A youngest child). How do superlatives and definiteness interact?
  
• In case you go for a typical European-style comparative construction with a word similar to 'than'
•  Is it a preposition that governs some case?
• Is a subordinating conjunction that preserves case?
• Is it a bit of both with conflicting behaviors in different situations?
  
• How are the spatial locatives "cut out"?
• Does a painting hang "on" or "in" the wall?
• Are there special exceptions to the general rule? ("På sjukhuset" in Swedish, where you normally are 'in a house', you are 'on the sickhouse', i.e. the hospital.)
  
• When would you use directions and when would you use locations?
• This is not entirely trivial: German, Russian and Finnish prefer to "put things somewhere" with direction marking on 'somewhere', Swedish prefers to "put things somewhere" with location marking on 'somewhere', except conservative dialects.
  
• How do reflexives work?
• separate marker for all persons or one unified marker?
• marker on the verb or separate object?
• can the verb marker maybe also go on adpositions?
  
• full case morphology for the reflexive pronoun or defective?
• is there a reflexive possessive?
  
• does the reflexive marker only refer to the subject, or can it refer to other participants of the clause as well ('They showed him himself in a mirror, a marvel he had never encountered before")
• how do reflexives operate over subclause boundaries? ("he knew that his father was a youngest child".)
  
• Are there reflexive possessive markers, i.e. a distinct possessive pronoun for 'he saw his car' when it's the subject's vs. when it's some other male referent's?
• Are reciprocals distinct from reflexives? If so, are the answers the same to all of the above, only with distinctive markers? Are they conflated in some constructions? Or do the answers differ strongly?
• Can reflexives lack an actual thing to refer to? e.g. "to know oneself is important".
• Definiteness
• Does the language encode definiteness? How? (Articles, suffixes on the noun, suffixes on adjectives, differences in congruence on the verb for definite or indefinite subjects or objects, differential case marking - e.g. definite objects take one case, indefinite ones another)
• Does the language conflate specific with indefinite or with definite?
• Specific = 'known to speaker, but not to listener'
• English conflates specific with indefinite, some languages with definite ("I am looking for a car", when I know exactly which car I am looking for or when I am just looking for a car that I'd fancy buying at the car store.)
• Does it perchance even distinguish all three?
  
•  Attributes in the noun phrase
• Are genitives a form of adjective or something else? (This can have syntactical effects, e.g. word order for adjectives vs. genitives, but also e.g. the lack of definite or indefinite articles in possessive constructions in e.g. English!)
• Can genitives combine with indefinite and definite articles if such exist?
• Can infinitives stand as attributes (c.f. in Swedish, 'the art of playing the violin' would be 'the art to play the violin'
• Can adpositional phrases be attributes? Would the speakers prefer saying 'the roof on the house' rather than 'the house's roof'?
• What kind of a system of indefinite pronouns does the language have? Is it different when they stand as determiners for NPs or when they stand independently? (For more info, see this.)
  
• Does the language have infinitives? How do they work? What kinds of infinitives are there?
• Can they take "real" subjects or do they require some kind of oblique marking on their subject? How about other arguments, such as objects?
  
• Can they take tense, aspect, moods? (Not as impossible as it might sound!)
• How do they interact with verb phrases and with noun phrases and maybe with adjectives?
• E.g. can you have constructions like "John is easy to please" vs. "John is eager to please".
• Can you have something like "I saw him run away" (or does that take a dedicated special form, or a bona fide subclause, e.g. "I saw as he ran away"?)
  
• Do clauses even require a finite verb?
• C.f. Russian or Finnish or colloquial Finland-Swedish:
• "kak najti rabotu" - how find a job?
• "hur hitta ett job?" - how find a job?
• "miten löytää työpaikka?" - how find a job
• Are some auxiliaries maybe actually nouns or adjectives or adverbs? ('to me (there is) a need for ...')
• Zero copulas?
  
• How do you hedge statements?
• How do you express evidentiality?
  
• How do you express volition?
• Lexically distinct verbs for volition vs. non-volition, and maybe some verbs just don't show the distinction?
• Verb forms?
• Auxiliaries?
• Embedding the involitional or volitional in a subclause where the main clause gets to express the volitionality?
• Adverbs?
• Differential subject marking?
• Are there quirky case things?
• These don't necessarily require a case system per se, but e.g. an adposition might serve just as well
• How do quirky cases interact with coordination over gaps with non-quirky case stuff
• Differential case things? (I.e. different cases for the object convey different things about definiteness or aspect or whatever.)
  
• Numerals
• How are higher numbers formed?
• Is there dedicated morphology for fractions? (e.g. 'half, a third, a fourth' with distinct morphology)
  
• Are there ordinals? Do 'twice, thrice, etc' have a pattern that continues? Are there collective numerals? Adverbs of group size (Fi: kahdestaan: by twos, 'together (in a group of two)'? Other numerals?
  
• Are cardinals followed by singulars or plurals? Is this distinct for different types of nouns (animate vs. inanimate, for instance)? Is it different in different cases? How does verb congruence work with this?
• In e.g. Finnish, verb congruence is singular unless a demonstrative pronoun or somesuch is involved, in which case the verb congruence again is plural.
• In Russian, it's a mess.
• In Finnish, in case the noun lacks singular forms, the numeral is also inflected for plural, and each constituent numeral of the numeral is in fact inflected for plural. This also occurs for the ordinals, so 'the twentythird (pair of) pants' in Finnish comes out as "the twentieth.plur third.plur pants", of course with each segment also inflected for the same case, etc.
  
• Negation
• Is there negative congruence (i.e. 'double negatives good') or not ('double negatives bad')?
• How does the scope of the negator interact with subjects and objects, with different types of determiners?
  
• Congruence
• What types of congruence are there? Do they break under some circumstances?
  
• Coordination: how does coordination over gaps work for 
• ... verbs with a shared subject
• ... objects with shared verbs
• ... adpositions with a shared noun
• ... nouns with a shared adposition
• ... congruence when the coordinating conjunction is a disjunction ('he or she is suspect.PLUR? or suspect.masc? or suspect.fem?...)
  
• How do complements of the copula work?
• Usually, they're not objects but in some languages they are!
• In some languages, they take non-nominative forms, and in some, the form they take can signify a variety of things.
• Is there a standard grammar? In case the language is set in a conworld of some kind, the following questions may be of interest:
  
• In what ways does this deviate from the "actual" grammar?
• Are there scholarly mistakes or misunderstandings in the standard grammar?
• Are there scholarly prejudices informing some of the rules in the standard grammar?
• Do the scholars lack some of the conceptual tools needed to be able to describe certain aspects of the grammar correctly?
• A conlanger can naturally, by their say-so, define the language one way or another. A linguist in the real world cannot. This is an important difference to keep in mind.