Ŋʒädär: Pondering Participles

These are just some early musings on a part of Ŋʒädär grammar. It is not very structured, but is provided as a sort of glimpse into how it comes along.

I have recently been tinkering with the participle system of Ŋʒädär. To go in a bit of an unusual direction I figured I should use a system of pre- and postposited particles to form them. This would give some nice advantages with regards to coming up with grammar: bracketing strategies, ('dance- and singing', "see -en and -ing"), potentially interesting grammaticalization paths (with the same particles having other uses in other parts of the language), and just a system that generates a lot of text in a grammar.

I want a somewhat "suboptimal system", i.e. one where a subset of possible combinations do not lend themselves to any very smooth construction but require full or near-full forms.

One strategy for reducing the optimality could be having some of the forms that are in complementary distribution have the opposite bracketing type: maybe present participles have postpositions and past participles have prepositions:

en eat -> eaten
eat ing -> eating

Maybe for a few quirky verbs, 'en VERB ing' has a special meaning. 

This far, I think the Ŋʒädär participle system will at its core have two tenses x two voices, but the voices will be integrated with the animacy hierarchy in a way that doesn't make it "passive vs active" but rather something like ...:
intransitives take a low marker with low animacy nouns and a high marker with high animacy nouns.

With transitive verbs
low animacy nouns x low animacy marker: active / reflexive
low animacy nouns x high animacy marker: passive
high animacy nouns x higher animacy marker: passive
high animacy nouns x high animacy marker: reflexive
high animacy nouns x low animacy marker: active

Historically, a preposited particle might be a conjunction and a (dummy?) pronoun or even a noun of some sort. A postposited particle might originate with an auxiliary verb or a postposition. These differences in origin may be reflected in different available markings - TAM, etc. One further type of origin for participle particles could be discourse particles.

Some modal distinctions that are even absent in the finite verb might pop up in the participles, but I think the grammaticalization path for those modalities needs to have a reach that would not have hit the finite verbs.

Detail #367: Neutral Participles

Consider participles that are not marked for voice at all. (Note: the English past vs. present participles are rather passive vs. present, although the way English participles work is a bit more complicated than that.) Now, such participles could behave in different ways depending on how we want to structure the language - animacy hierarchies, for one, could be a very natural approach to how to parse them.

However, let's go for something less obvious, but still pretty obvious: let's have the case role of the NP with regards to a finite VP also double as its role for the participle:

the man sold the castrate-PTCPL horse:
horse is the object of sold, so it's also the object of castrate, thus:
the man sold the castrated horse

the travel-PTCPL man made a bid:
man is the subject of offer, and therefore also of travel, thus:
the travelling man made a bid

What can we do with this? One obvious potential restriction could be one of only permitting this to work for arguments – non-argument adverbials and such seem less likely to have their 'role' passed on to a participle. 

A second thing we could do is make the role that is passed on to the participle be less carefully differentiated - maybe not distinguishing objects from indirect objects or somesuch.

Here, a light ergativity could be introduced: intransitive participles could be accepted as 'active' participles for objects of transitive verbs.

To make the system more flexible, one could use resumptive pronouns in the desired case, which could lead to a neat way of turning case markers into voice markers.

I had an idea on ergativity and participles, that I have since forgotten. I am hopeful that I might be able to reconstruct it fully and post it soon enough.

Detail #3: some analytical tense constructions

In some language where the normal indicative present (progressive) is the simplest tense, morphologically, the active participle is used with copula and whatever verb construction is used in place of to have, to obtain  various TAMs by various constructions. To be is used with intransitive verbs, to have with transitive ones.

subj: nom, (obj: acc),  participle.acc = inchoative
subj: comitative, (obj: acc),  participle.nom = habitual [exceptional in using to be even when an object is present]
subj: dat, obj: instr, participle.nom = indicates that the subject would like to do something. Intransitives require a dummy object, which normally is the numeral "one" or an indefinite pronoun.
subj. dat, (obj: nom or acc), is + participle(comitative) = obligation

The piece of paper on which I wrote this idea down years ago was tiny, and therefore there's a lot of really short ad hoc abbreviations in it. Hence, exactly what I meant is a bit unclear to me.

Still, I think a language with something like this would be best with, say, 4-5 different constructions along these lines, maybe one or two of which only appear with objects present. Finally, they shouldn't completely cover a certain type of thing - like each construction encoding a particular tense or a particular aspect or a particular mood; they should each express some combination of tenses, aspects and moods, and not necessarily even just one of them; and preferrably, they would be somewhat orthogonal to each other in what they express, so that they not form a neat paradigm.

Not every combination of subj.[case1], obj[case2], participle[case3] should be used, and some constructions where two of them have the same case could very well be permitted.