Detail #435: Reflexive markers

This is a companion post to Detail #422: Variations on Reflexives. Detail #422 mostly elaborated on the syntax of reflexive reference. This post will elaborate on ways of encoding reflexiveness.

This was inspired by this quote in a paper I recently read:

"There are three types of reflexives in the world’s languages (Lichtenberk, 1994, p. 3504): 

1. nominal (nouns or pronouns),

2. verbal (the reflexive marker is a part of the verb morphology),

3. possessive (e.g. the possessive adjectives)."

This naturally made me wonder if we can imagine some additional ways. Naturally, a few ideas emerged.

1. Adverbial reflexive markers

 Adverbs like 'back', 'in return', 'alone', etc.

2. Adpositional reflexive markers

One could imagine some types of adposition to be more strongly associated with reflexivity, but maybe have a lower semantic granularity than other prepositions in the language. Consider, e.g. a situation where 'on him' develops to be reflexive but 'at him' to be non-reflexive.

3. Auxiliaries

One could easily imagine verbs like 'get' developing into more of a reflexive meaning than a passive meaning. I.e. 'get fucked' could just as well develop to mean 'fuck yourself'.

4. Omission / Default reflexivity

To some extent, this is sort of something already; 'wash' in some languages defaults to a reflexive meaning. However, ... this is of course only reflexive in the sense of 'reflexive in some target language'. However, if you were to ask 'who are you washing' in those languages, an explicit reflexive would probably be given.

5. That weird Finnish thing

A related thing is the Finnish reflexive -nsa/-an possessive suffix, which is reflexive when no genitive pronoun precedes it, but just a regular third person possessive when the noun is preceded by a genitive.

Detail #434: Number, Clusivity, Personal Pronouns

I imagine this might actually be something that exists in a language. Consider first and second person pronouns and number. Normally, the number marked is the number of the group discussed. I.e. when I say 'we', I might very well be the single person present who belongs to this 'we'. Of course, there's clusivity which can clarify this, but let's consider plural 'you'. This may very well be uttered towards a single person who represents a group that mostly is absent.

Is there any language that encodes both the number of the group it refers to, as well as the number of persons currently present out of that group?

In part, however, this might even be a bit redundant, and we could introduce a further complication beyond the redundancy.

The obvious uses are:

1-singular-plural: I who am the only person present, and some people
2-singular-plural: you who are the only person present, and some people

Is the second slot meant to signify number of non-present, or is it meant to include 'the full number of referents'? These two give different interpretations:

interpretation 1: 1-plural-plural: I, and some people
interpretation 2: 1-plural-plural: I, and some people who are present, and some other people

Thus, we here have two options: conflate the distinction whenever several members of the group are present, or distinguish them thus:

1-plural: I and some people who are present
1-plural-plural: I, and some people who are present and some people who aren't

Naturally, this should be easy to extend to duals and trials.

An interesting simple approach for a conlang could be this though: just have singular and plural, and distinguish by number of addressees.Also, 'I' can mean 'we' if only I, out of the whole group, am present.

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.
  

Some family terms in Ćwarmin

The basic family terms:

julo = son
ot = oldest son
zel = daughter

father =  aru
mother = viri

brother = raŋa
older brother = cawot
sister = zuja

In older Ćwarmin, possessive suffixes existed, but are used in very restricted contexts. However, in some lexemes, they appear as derivative elements of unclear meaning. Thus

-ata | -ete, formerly 1sg possessive

has lead to these terms:

raŋata ('my brother') = uncle
zujata ('my sister') = aunt
aruta ('my father') = grandfather
virite ('my mother') = grandmother

Apparently, parents referring to their siblings and parents has become a way children refer to their uncles, aunts and grandparents, and this was lexicalized. Other synonyms do exist, however. In addition:

aruta and virite are sometimes used as formal address to parents.
julata and zelete are used by some clergymen to refer to congregants.
cawata is used by some clergymen to refer to their senior clergymen.

The plural forms never have the possessive suffixes in use, as the morphological complexities for that has been largely forgotten. 'Otata', 'my oldest son' appears in some testaments and such.

Parents- and siblings-in-law also have forms such as 

raŋaś
zujaś
aruś
viriś

In some regions, second person suffixes (-aba/-ebe) are used instead of these historical third person suffixes. Why second or third person suffixes won out in different regions is unclear.

Detail #433: The Antideponent Verb

Let's for a moment consider the deponent verb. This is a verb which lacks morphologically active forms, despite being active. This might seem a bit weird, but let us have a look at some Swedish deponent verbs.

First, Swedish has a morphological passive, mostly formed by affixing -s to verb forms. (Swedish also has two periphrastic passives, but this is irrelevant for now.)

Here are some verbs which never appear without their -s:
andas (to breathe)
hoppas (to hope)
minnas (to remember)
låtsas (to pretend)
brås (to take after, to be similar to someone - in both cases due to family connections)

Some of these can take objects (granted, a minority). Andas can take the gas which is breathed ('breathe air', or, say, the aliens of Jupiter breathe methane - varelserna från Jupiter andas metan). "Hoppas" can take det ('that, it') as its object, signifying 'I hope so' (but literally 'I hope that'). Minnas can take any person or thing or fact as its object. Låtsas often is an auxiliary with a transitive verb under it.

In Swedish, these lack a past participle - but some do have a gerund (that morphologically looks exactly like a past participle; however, syntactical differences clarify that it indeed only is a gerund). I will warn against looking into lists of Swedish deponents, because some of them do seem to be just passives with slightly odd semantic shifts, or sometimes even just ... passives. The Swedish -s form also imho is not just a passive marker but also happens to be a reciprocal and an aspectual marker.

Other languages with deponents may have other restrictions - maybe all the deponents are intransitive, or maybe a verb is only partially deponent (i.e. deponent in, say, the participles but not in the finite forms).

Let's make up a set of features:

+ active syntactically
+/- transitive
-  active finite forms
- active infinite forms
+ passive finite forms
+ passive infinite forms
- can take agent adverb (e.g. the 'was seen by us' part)

Let's use these features to consider the antideponent.

Verbs such as 'boil' in English seem to permit somewhat similar behaviors, i.e. they can be passive in meaning (or active), thus passive syntactically is partially true. However, English does have active finite and infinite forms for boil, i.e. 'to be boiled' and the participle 'boiled' itself. The active form, 'boiling' interestingly enough does serve to convey the passive meaning of 'being boiled' as well. It cannot, however, take the agent:
the egg is boiling by me is wrong, I'm boiling the egg is acceptable.

Let's inverse the above table fully:

- active syntactically
+/- transitive
+ active finite forms
+ active infinite forms
- passive finite forms
- passive infinite forms
+ can take agent adverb

The interesting bit here is the +/-transitive, and I think that's where we could distinguish this from run off the mill split-ergativity, where some verbs just happen to have an ergative-like behavior. If we restricted this so it only ever happened with intransitives, and the actual subject was demoted to agent adverbial, whereas the subject either is empty or a dummy pronoun, this is getting us into some interesting ground.

Another option is just simply having these as a sort of lexical restriction: these verbs just don't do passive. I think English maybe actually might have some of those even beyond the auxiliaries?

A further option is of course to take something like English 'I broke the window' but only permit these two options:

The window broke.
The window broke by me.
*I broke the window.

Once more voices are involved, some interesting options emerge, such as gaps in the voice paradigm for verbs.

Detail #432: Generalized Wh-movement

Wh-movement tends to come in two forms in conlangs, as far as I can tell: English-like or wh-in situ. Let's consider some other options! This post was inspired by some questions in the conlang mailing list.

1. Wh-at the end

There are, apparently, some reasons to consider this highly unlikely in languages. OTOH, it might not be entirely unattested.

2. Wh-in wackernagel

The Wackernagel position, i.e. the second word in a clause, seems a rather natural option.

3. Wh-next-to-verb

Both the position after and before the verb seem to make sense as possible attractors for the interrogative pronoun.

4. Discontinuous wh

There are further complications we can consider, such as discontinuous-wh. I find this most likely for two types of interrogatives: determiners and adjectival interrogatives ('what type of a', 'yes/no-query determiner', 'which', 'of what qualities', etc).

These actually occur in some Slavic languages with interrogatives like "kakoj" and "kotoryj". 

Anyways, discontinuous-wh can probably be combined with any of the three previous forms, and in different ways - maybe the head noun is moved instead and the wh remains? Maybe vice versa. Different movements for both parts of the interrogative noun phrase seems unlikely, but parts of the noun phrase may well be pulled along with the interrogative particle.

Let's imagine "Q" is an interrogative particle that forms a yes/no-question focused on the noun it belongs to. Congruence makes it clear it pairs with "house" in this imagined language, marked by roman lowercase numerals picked at random. We can now imagine that Q pulls along pertinent 'factors' along with it:

Q.iii red.iii you saw house.iii?
did you see the red house?

Verbal interrogative markers seem somewhat more likely to be discontinuous - just consider the English polar question.

Relative Clauses in Dairwueh

 I have previously given a short introduction to relative clauses in Dairwueh. Let's up the ante a bit.

Resumptive pronouns in relative attributes

Since the relativizing verb does not carry (much) information about the syntactical role that the referent has in the subclause, resumptive pronouns are often used. Some dialects and varieties of Dairwueh have a resumptive pronoun stem ner- (from a historical nez, the fricative popping back in some forms). Most use the neuter pronoun stem, but inflected for gender - the capital literary form specifically uses the t-stem version of the nominative and accusative.

A peculiar thing about the resumptive pronoun is that it can even be used for the subject of a subsequent subclause, as if this were how to form two subclauses in English:

the man who plays the guitar and he sings.

Weird restriction

Consider an utterance like 'don't reject applicants for being too boring'. In English this cannot be rephrased as 'don't reject applicants who are too boring', since this alters the meaning significantly. A strict reading has the rephrasing signify that no one that is too boring must be rejected, whereas the first only means that boringness must not influence the decision.

In Dairwueh, use of the irrealis form of the subordinating verb is used, among other things, for this particular structure.

The irrealis form can also be used to communicate a purely irrealis subclause, e.g. 'those who would do so-and-so'. To enforce the "purely irrealis" reading, a resumptive pronoun is used. To enforce the purely 'for being X' reading,the subordinate verb may be irrealis instead of infinitive - or in some varieties, a demonstrative pronoun is placed before the relative verb.

Finally, the irrealis form of the relative verb can also express an indirect question: I wonder the men who will sing -> I wonder whether the men will sing.

Use of the interrogative pronoun before a relative subclause requires irrealis in some dialects, and requires irrealis for present tense in many dialects.

Adjectives have a similar function as well when using the irrealis participle marker e-...-šis on them.