Detail #58: Kinship terms and morphology

A thing that I hadn't noticed earlier but suddenly dawned on me is that in English, several of the closest kinds of kinships have nouns that end in the same sequence of sounds as agent nouns deriving from verbs, -er.

While I do believe this is a coincidence, (compare how Swedish has broder, syster, fader, moder, but -are as the agent derivation morpheme. (All but syster somewhat restricted to higher stylistic registers or archaic use, having slightly reduced forms in colloquial use - bror, far, mor, with brorsa, syrra, farsa/pappa and morsa/mamma being quite low register).

Now, what if a language has voice- or transitivity-marking agentive (or patientive) affixes, a bit like -ee vs. -er, but including things like reciprocals, and kinship terms were treated as though they were derived from verbs (although they are not). Maybe there could be interesting uses of morphology there, such as -

brother.reciprocal agent.plur = a set of persons who are each other's brothers

my brother.intransitive = my brother (uttered by a woman)

my brother.reciprocal = my brother (uttered by a man)

my fathers.intransitive.vocative =  every man that has offspring among my guests!

my fathers.transitive.vocative =  my ancestors!

my father.intransitive = my older friend

my father.transitive = my father

Further vague things that might turn into ideas:

• something transitivity-like for nouns, that isn't just possession-related or related to the noun being an agentive form of a verb
• more asymmetric kinship terms (e.g. older brother, younger brother)
• reciprocal passives enabling chains - e.g. fathers.reciprocal.passive = a chain of ancestors (not really reciprocal, but each member of the set but one is the father of a father), parents.reciprocal.passive = one line of ancestors, parents.transitive.passive = all ancestors, ... who knows, there can be any amount of weird semantic things going on here.

Musing: Congruence blocking blocking, feasible?

Some introspection on me speaking Finnish recently got me thinking about things blocking congruence blocks. First, a description of the situation in Finnish:

Finnish negation works slightly like English negation - you have a negative auxiliary (ei, c.f. don't) which has congruence for person (en, et, ei, emme, ette, eivät, c.f. don't, doesn't, isn't, ain't, aren't, ... ). However, unlike in English, it does not take the infinitive, but a special form (the conegative form, which in the present tense indicative mood, for all persons is identical to the third person singular imperative), and unlike in English, tense, aspect and mood does not go on the negative auxiliary. Instead, the form the main verb takes indicates all this information. In the imperative, there's a special auxiliary (älä, älkää, älköön, älkäämme, älkööt), which in somewhat archaic language actually distinguishes a sub-mood by a special form (ällös).

Now, the thing that got me thinking is that as a semi-native speaker of Finnish, I have internalized these rules very well, but only so much that I sometimes get the feeling that deviating from them would feel more natural. Especially when the verb is emphasized, it feels like the usual verb form would attract more attention to it and the regular negation structure feels too mundane?

On the other hand, since the content verb has a very weakened congruence in the negative (in the past tense and in the imperatives, number is distinguished), one could basically argue that the negation serves as a congruence block. Is it reasonable to assume languages can have a block operating on a block this way?

I find the Finnish negative a fun thing in how non-natives sometimes deal with it: a fair number of Swedish-speakers maintain congruence and can even use the wrong verb form, so 'I didn't watch it' comes out as *en katsoin sitä (instead of en katsonut sitä)- where katsoin is the regular past tense indicative, and 'I don't watch it' comes out as *en katson sitä, instead of en katso s:itä. Estonian has a similar negative verb as Finnish has, but it lacks person congruence on it, and some Estonian speakers of Finnish carry that over too. During my stint at a place with lots of Estonian workers, I recall some of them sometimes going all pro-drop on negative sentences, thus obtaining wonderfully unclear statements like 'ei tiedä'. So, two relatively large groups of non-native Finnish speakers (I surmise there's more Russians than Estonians in that category, though) have quite the opposite mistake in their formation of the negative - one keeping too much information, the other omitting too much.

Somehow, I find the Estonian approach more likely to cause a congruence block block to appear, though.

Challenge #5: Verbal numbers

What possible things other than

• existential statements of amounts ("there are N so-and-so" → so-and-so N.verb)
• N repetitions of an action
• increasing something by a factor

could verbs derived from numbers signify? 

Modern forum culture is kind of introduce the idea of 'stating agreement, where each person stating such says which number in the line he has' (seconded, thirded, but I have not seen any higher numbers.)

My mind does go in a few directions with regards to this:

• time-span related things, "I seven work on that now" → I will work for seven days on that
• rank-related things, maybe intransitive (he tens → he is the boss of ten people), maybe transitive (he tens technicians → he is the boss of ten technicians) 
• performing a specific number of culturally significant obligations? Verbed ordinals could signify specific obligations.
• Worship of some kind?

Other ideas would be interesting as well.

Detail #57: Congruence blocking, again

A language where specifically night-time actions take no verb congruence.

Challenge #4: Dechticaetiativity and Serial Verb Constructions

Could dechticaetiativity be combined with serial verb constructions in a way that creates weird consequences in a language? I've been trying to come up with constructions that combine these features and such consequences, but to little avail. Any ideas?

For those who don't know, dechticaetiativity is like ergativity but for objects and indirect objects, so that the direct object of a monotransitive verb and the indirect of a ditransitive verb are marked the same, and the direct object of a ditransitive verb is marked in the dechticaetiative case.

I bought a book  → I bought a book.acc

I bought you a book → I bought you.acc a book.decht 

Serial verb constructions are constructions where two verbs cooperate to provide more meaning, such as

he take knife cut meat  → he cuts the meat with the knife

As always, suggestions are welcome in the comment field.

Detail #56: Verb Congruence Blocking / Quirky Case

This detail might make it into Dairwueh:

Coordinated verbs, where the first has a quirky case subject, the other verb has null congruence even if there's a reasonable person form for it.

 "I like this and recommend it to everyone" → me.dat appeal.pres.0 this.nom and recommend.0 it to everyone

Contrast with:

"I hate this and recommend avoiding it" → I.nom hate.pres.1sg and recommend.1sg avoid.acc it.acc

Detail #55: Wackernagel adposition blocking

If an adjective is extracted from a PP with a Wackernagel-position adposition in it, the adposition becomes a preposition instead. Adjective extraction has the following uses, functions and general grammatical properties:

• Polar questions involving an adpositional phrase with an adjective - 

in the red car: the in red.obl car.obl, or red.obl in car.obl  

is it in the red car?: red.obl.Q it is in the car.obl, red.obl.Q it is in car.obl

If there is a PP without an adjective in it, the preposition may be stranded and the noun fronted. 

•  Emphasizing the adjective. Red.obl it is in house.obl - It is in the red house. 
• Presence of (intransitive/particle-like) adpositions nearby

See also: Wackernagel adpositions.