On Non-Finite Verbs, Chapter 2: The Basic Infinitive

How much is there to write about the basic infinitive? A surprising lot, really.

The English Infinitive

The English infinitive does happen to be the dictionary form, and is basically the stem of the verb. It has a morphological quirk, in that some auxiliaries lack an infinitive. Such lacks do happen for individual non-auxiliary verbs in some languages, e.g. Finnish lacks one for one of its verbs for 'to itch'.

What does the infinitive do? The typical response would perhaps be 'serves as the subordinate verb for another verb', but this misses several other uses, and also conflates several rather distinct uses into a single category.

Let's start out with the subordinate verb, though.

he will go
he wants to go

Already here we find a nice split - infinitives with and without 'to'. This is mainly governed by the finite verb (a certain class called 'modal auxiliaries' do not take them - but this class is not strictly described by its name - some modal auxiliaries have no modal meaning, some non-modal auxiliaries do, etc.

We do also find e.g. a modal use of the verb 'have' taking to+inf: I have to go.

A different verbal construction where the infinitive is featured is this:

I saw her dance the jig
She listened to him play the cembalo

These don't convey the same thing as a subclause; it's not "I saw when she danced the jig" or "I saw that she danced the jig". More like, "I saw the event consisting of her dancing the jig", having the agent of the subordinate verb be both the object of the main verb and subject of the subordinate one.

And further this:

He wanted us to go away
We asked him to sing a song

These four previous examples differ from earlier ones in having a different agent of the infinitive than of the main verb; this agent is not marked as a canonical subject, however, but by an oblique case. It is not very unusual in languages for infinitives not to be able to take canonical subjects, but rather to take some form of oblique agent.

Infinitives can also act as nouns that are a stand-in for the verb phrase in statements about a verb phrase:

to paint the house is quite the chore
to win is fun
to err is human

In English, both 'to paint' and the participle/gerund 'painting' can serve in this position. These can take oblique subjects, 'for us to pay these debts will take years', 'her singing at the opera tonight will be spectacular'.

The infinitive can also work as an attribute of a noun:

the will to live
the desire to seek revenge
failure to comply
a sight to see
the first woman to serve as judge
the only man to admit to being wrong

Some of these seem to be almost like relative subclauses! Further, sometimes they are passive (a sight to see), sometimes active (the first woman to serve as a judge).

Arguably, English infinitives can mark certain one tense distinction and voice - 'to see' , 'to have seen', 'to be seen', 'to have been seen'. They can also be negated, and depending on your stance, either with the 'not' before or after 'to'. Some positions seem not to license the perfect tense:

*I saw him have hit the jackpot
I saw him be beaten by a gangster
*I saw him have been beaten by a gangster

 There are more ways it is used in English, but I will introduce them later on in this post.

The Swedish Infinitive

The English infinitive has a very similar cousin in Swedish. It has even undergone a similar development after the languages diverged, where both acquired a preposition that marked them, and this preposition indeed splits the auxiliaries mainly along very similar lines. Don't quote me on this, but I suspect Swedish has more 'subtle collocations', here, where some combinations of auxiliary and main verb may deviate from the more regular pattern for an auxiliary.

 All the syntactical details above hold for Swedish as well, but here we get a bit of a deviation: in Swedish, infinitives are more often attributes of nouns than they are in English. Especially in cases where they are not subclause-like in meaning.

konsten att förföra
"the art to seduce"
~ the art of seduction

This is significantly more common in Swedish than English, with constructions like viljan att leva (the will to live), en baddare att sjunga (a whiz of singing), etc being fairly frequent in texts.

 Swedish also likes having infinitives as attributes of adjectives:

han är bra att laga mat
he is good to cook food

hon är rolig att tala med
she is fun to talk to

vi är svåra att slå 
we are hard to beat

Obviously, two of these work in English too! But the first example is weird. English prefers either 'he cooks well', or 'he is good at cooking'. 

Other than these differences, the main differences appear in some raising-structures. We will look more into such things later.

Morphologically though, Swedish differs from English: the infinitive is a particular inflected form of the verb. The suffix that marks the infinitive is -a, but this may be suppressed if the stem ends in a vowel. The imperative happens to coincide with the stem for conjugations I and III, but for II and IV, the imperative does not coincide with the infinitive. C.f. hoppa <> hoppa ('to jump, to hop'); springa <> spring ('to run'). Thus, in Swedish, -a is (sometimes) a morpheme marking the infinitive, sometimes -a is supressed.

The Swedish infinitive can be negated - with the negation going between 'att' and the infinitive (or before the infinitive if 'att' is absent). It can also take the passive -s suffix, or use any of the other passive constructions. It can also be in the perfect ~tense, but this is also restricted in ways very similar to English.

In both English and Swedish, infinitives can sometimes have "non-anaphoric" reflexives: to know oneself is important; att känna sina gränser är viktigt (to know one's own limits is important).

The Finnish Infinitive

Finnish has an awkward nomenclature, including several numbered infinitives. However, the infinitive I is the most similar to the above forms in use: it is used after modal auxiliaries and after some other auxiliaries. It is not used in constructions such as 'I heard him sing', where a participle is used instead. Even for the infinitive I, Finnish does have an analogous formation to the English 'to'-infinitive: -kse.

onnistua -> onnistuakse-

This is not used quite as frequently as the English to-forms - it is for instance not used as a subject of a statement about the verb, or as the subordinate verb of an auxiliary or such. Oftentimes, it corresponds to the English 'so as to [inf]', or 'for to [inf]', but will sometimes correspond to just a 'to [inf]' construction. However! Sometimes this will correspond to infinitive IV instead, so ... this will require further investigation in post focusing on the Finnish system.

 

The -kse-infinitive further requires a possessive suffix corresponding to the subject: onnistuakseni (for me to succeed), onnistuaksesi (for you to succeed), etc.

 

Onnistuakseni tarvitsen apua -> for me to succeed, I need help

Lui-n kirja-n oppia-kse-ni musiikkiteoria-n alkee-t.
read-I book-acc learn-kse-my musictheory's foundation-s.

 

Comparing and contrasting the Finnish non-finite landscape to the English system will be done in a later post.

 

As an attribute, the basic infinitive I is similar to Swedish with regards to things like 'the skill to cook good food' (kyky laittaa hyvää ruokaa), but the infinitive I cannot be used in an active relative subclause  type of way; however, as a passive subclause it can work: 'hyvä kirja lukea lomalla', although a different form might be more idiomatic (luettavaksi or lukemaksi, the first a passive present participle, the second an infinitive IV, both in the translative case). Here, certain adjectives and quantifiers seem to license the use of an infinitive as an attribute or as a complement of the copula. The -kse-infinitive can also be used as an attribute expressing for whom something is for doing something to: eväitä syödäksesi: snacks-part eat-inf-kse-yours: snacks for you to eat. However, the passive present participle is more often used for this.

 

As a complement of the copula, the Finnish infinitive I further signifies 'almost did', often as a near-miss accident. "Olin kompastua" - I was (about to) stumble.

 

Finnish does not use the infinitive I for construction such as 'I saw her dance'. Instead it uses the active present participle in the genitive, thus a bit like 'I saw her dancing', but actually 'I saw her dancing's'.

The infinitive cannot be passive; any passivization would instead use some kind of passive participle. The infinitive cannot be negated using the regular 'ei-' negation strategy; instead, olla +mAttA, i.e. essentially 'be without [verb]ing' is used instead.

 

The infinitive can  take the perfect tense, but this seems very rare to me - I do find an example 'olla syönyt ateria' - to have eaten a meal. Some case shenanigans actually feel more natural to me: 'To have run', for instance, could come out as 'olla juoksuneena', essentially 'to be [in the role of] having run'. The 'olla syönyt' construction does work as subordinate of other verbs, but feels odd when used more nominally.

The Portuguese Infinitive

Famously, Portuguese infinitives can inflect for person. I am not an expert on the syntax of the infinitive in Portuguese, so this will be left here for now as a sort of heads-up.

A tabular representation of some differences of the basic infinitive

This table will grow over time, with all kinds of subcases and differences, and of course several forms per language. I figure colour-coding will also help seeing what's going on once it starts growing unwieldy.

Property	English	Swedish	Finnish I	Portuguese
Citation form	✓	✓	✓	✓
Infinitive marker (like to, att)	✓ (sometimes)	✓ (sometimes)	✗ (infinitive II is structurally similar to such a marker)	✗
Dedicated infinitive ending	✗	✓	✓	✓
Person agreement	✗	✗	✗ (mandatory on infinitive II)	✓
Voice distinctions	✓	✓	✓/✗*	✓
Tense / aspect distinctions	✓ (limited)	✓ (limited)	(rare)	✓
Regular negation	✓	✓	✗	✓

* The Finnish passive is really more of an indefinite person; however,  Finnish has a significant bunch of valency- and transitivity-altering derivative suffixes, which do permit infinitives. IMHO, saying that the Finnish infinitive can't be passive is thus marginally misleading, but 'traditionally' correct.

Summary:

We've seen some differences between infinitives in four languages of Europe; the "basic" infinitives of these languages all have a core of shared uses:

• A sort of noun-like head of a verb phrase
• A verb that is subordinated under another verb in some way.

 However, we find differences as well: the use of markers like to/att, the use of infinitives as attributes, their syntactic distribution in general, and how the roles that one language's infinitive takes is distributed onto other forms in other languages.

Turns out the infinitive is not so much a single thing as a complex of things.

 

On Non-Finite Verbs pt 1: Introduction

Non-finite verbs are a somewhat under-described thing in conlangs in general. Oftentimes, a conlang will "have" an infinitive, but the author will not describe it in any detail, leaving us to assume its usage is similar to the English infinitive. Infinitives are of course not the only type of non-finite verb either.

Even within Europe, there's differences in how non-finite verbs work. Let's begin by consider a short list of terms.

• Infinitives
• Gerunds
• Supines
• Converbs
  
• Participles
• Other 

A line-up of the usual suspects (and some new acquaintances?)

Nota bene: the terminology for non-finite verb forms is very tradition-dependant. A term can be used in different languages in very different ways. Thus, we cannot derive any typological observations from the names here. I'll, however, ... yeah, ignore that a bit.

Non-finite verbs

 Non-finite verbs are verbs that (usually) cannot be the predicate of a clause. They often are morphologically somewhat 'deficient', lacking some category that finite verbs mark; however, they may also mark morphological categories that make little sense on finite verbs.

Infinitive 

The "basic" infinitive is often - but not always - the dictionary form, c.f. Latin where the present first person singular is the dictionary form. In many European languages, its most typical use is that of being a subordinate verb to an auxiliary:

I will go.
You can always hope.
He wants to learn to play the piano.

Here, we can see a few interesting things: in English, some auxiliaries require a particle before the infinitive. Also, infinitives can be subordinate to infinitives.

Infinitives are not necessarily "uninflected". In German, Swedish, Russian, Finnish and many other languages, the basic infinitive in fact has some morphological marker on it:

essen, äta, est', syödä

Further into this series, we'll look at what uses the 'basic' infinitive is put to in different languages, and we'll find that even this "basic component" varies in many ways from language to language.

Participles

Participles are forms that express something along the lines of a relative subclause: 

a singing man <> a man who sings
a destroyed house <> a house that has been destroyed

 This hides within its scope a lot of space for variation as well. Usually, participles are 'adjective-like verbs' in some sense. Germanic languages conflate voice and TAM a bit for these, whereas other languages may keep these more distinct.

Gerunds

A gerund is often something of a 'nominalization' of a verb; "the act of ...". In English, this is largely conflated with the present participle, but in some languages it's a distinct form, and even in English, regular infinitives sometimes operate a bit like gerunds.

 

Sleeping is important.
I like playing the bass.

 

Unlike nouns, they can take arguments along the lines of subjects and objects, but they may operate under other restrictions and rules for case assignment (or similar) than a finite verb.

 

Latin has a form called the gerundive;  this is a 'modally specific' participle in some sense: viz. "that which needs to be destroyed/repaired/...".

 

The Latin gerund is not quite the same as the 'gerund' in general, but will be dealt with in greater detail later.

Verb nouns 

Some sources distinguish these from gerunds, but this is a confused mess. Just generally perhaps 'the less canonically verb-like and more canonically noun-like the form is, the more justified this term is'?

Deverbal nouns

Deverbal nouns are perhaps the furthest removed from verbs, often breaking argument structure, taking adjectives instead of adverbs, etc. 

Masdar

This term is used in Arabic linguistics and in some traditions influenced by it, and is about as messy as the latin-based terminology.  

Supine

In Latin, the supine is a non-finite form that has a specific selection of cases; it often is used for the subordinate verb when something is done in order to do something else. In Swedish, it is a verb form only used to form the perfect tense.

Serial verbs 

These are verbs which derive TAM and subject and so on from a previous verb.

Converbs

Subordinate infinite verbs that provide some kind of additional information about the main verb: 'while singing', 'by poking', 'not to annoy ...', 'so as to unshackle'.

Transgressives

This seems to be a west slavic term for converbs.

Plan

I will present some of these categories in some detail, and then go into greater detail with regards to the systems present in several languages, sometimes comparing and contrasting similar languages (like Swedish and English). Later on, I may get back to a sort of 'typologizing' description of the categories. My intention is to map out at least some of the interesting bits of this parameter space for conlangers.

"Interwoven" Conreligions in the Bryatesle world

In the Dairwueh-Bryatesle world, several types of religions exist by the side of the standard religions, and have overlap of membership. How does this work?

These religions, much like the standard religions, have rituals, myths, a membership structure - often with a hierarchy, supernatural beings, and sometimes even texts. However, they differ in "magisterium" from other religions. A rather illustrative example of this are the two sailor religions.

The Dairwueh and Bryatesle are largely maritime civilizations. Sailors have always nurtured a lore of their own, and in the DB world, this lore has come to form much tighter, cohesive structures than on earth. 

However, there are two competing, major sailor religions - and these can strongly disapprove of each other's views regarding a variety of things, and crews are therefore often rather uniform when it comes to religion. Sailors come from most of the normal Bryatesle and Dairwueh religious backgrounds, and have these religions as an equal part of their religious mental landscape. Conflicts between your "land" religion and your sailor religion may be just never resolved, or may affect how you pick which sailor religion to join. Options may be scarce, however, if you live in a port where only one of the religions are widely represented.

1. The western sailor religion

Appeasement of hostile spirits is an important part of the ritual system.

Certain colours of sails are considered lucky: red is especially favoured. Passengers need to participate in a special ritual on land before embarking and are forced to wear special clothing during their voyage. This clothing in fact also has some buoyancy, essentially being a type of proto-life vest.

The ritual includes eating a small amount of seafood, confessing to the captain any sins one has committed that may anger God and cause him to prevent the ship from reaching the harbour, and a form of baptism. The idea of the baptism is this: if it is your lot in life to drown, God should take this opportunity and not pull the entire ship down for your sake.

The spirits of the sea are not considered evil or good per se, but rather neutral and sometimes ill-tempered. Areas where particularly nasty spirits are held to be present are avoided. Spirits tend not to relocate.

Former sailors are still held to be ritually valid members, and must participate in sailor rituals rather than passenger rituals (and may not need to wear the passenger-clothing if travelling as passengers).

There are no, or nearly no 'secrets' that cannot be divulged to outsiders. Family members on land are expected to participate in some land-based ceremonies and even carry out their own rituals on land, and often contribute to the production of ritual articles - including the clothing for passengers.

There is a pope-like figure, the father captain. He has quite some political clout, and can, for instance, declare embargoes against city-states or villages. The clergy consists of the captains.

If circumstances allow, there are regular religious services on the deck - nearly every day. Even those sailors who are confined to the brig are permitted to be on the deck for this. Some parts of the rituals are not permissible for passengers (but can be witnessed). The service also includes judgement in case such is needed, and the administration of minor punishments may occur during or immediately after the service. Rewards, promotions and the sharing of plans occur during these services.

The services include tales of sea monsters and spirits, singing, often a shared meal, and sometimes a sermon. This sermon may include any kind of advice, not only ethical: "in our next harbour, avoid the bar at the western pier".

Songs are sometimes veiled in metaphors and allegory, but this is not a mandatory feature: the message can be clear.

2. The eastern sailor religion

Appeasement is considered an invitation; therefore, they instead try different types of ritual exorcisms. The lore teaches that there are two basic sides of spirits at work over the seas, and these blocks are basically "cohesive". Thus, there is one evil block and one good block. Evil spirits do not counteract each other (generally). Good spirits, are not to be invoked willy-nilly, and may demand quite a hefty price if invoked in vain.

Routes where evil spirits largely holds sway are avoided; however, a ritual exorcism may be successful, and an area may become acceptable again. Evil can also retake areas.

Some groups within the religion even make up plans for how to wage the spiritual war against evil spirits. There is no top leader. Sometimes, the dozen or so grand boatswains gather and hold synods. Individual grand boatswains may abstain from adhering by the decisions. Captains are also important authorities, but do not hold a comparable religious function as boatswains do, and are way less involved with the rituals of the eastern sailors.

Travelers are expected not to participate in the rituals, and the less a voyager knows about the rituals, the happier the sailors are. Former sailors are considered (respected) outsiders and must no longer participate in rituals. Family on land are expected to abide by their land-based religion and not to pry into the secrets of the seas.

The full crew seldom participates in services and rituals, but rather it tends to be subsets at any time. In harbours, however, some full crew services do take place.

Many songs sung to synchronize the work have lyrics that refer to the tenets of the religion; however, these are often shrouded in metaphors so as to prevent voyagers from being able to figure out what is what. 

3. Pirates

Some pirates have subverted both of these religions in a way similar to how e.g. some forms of satanism subverts Christianity in our world. They may seek to collaborate with evil spirits, or even control them. They attempt to bind or prevent good spirits from doing their thing. There are both 'eastern' and 'western'-aligned (anti-aligned?) pirates, but the dividing lines are not as strict, and subverting both at the same time is possible. Western and eastern pirates thus have a weird ecumenism.

Interactions with land-based religions

Most of the land-based clergy respect the sea-based clergy, but there are a few minor conflicts. The main conflicts are between the western captains and the Kaildaper clergy. These religions have some shared roots (since kaildaper evolved among western fishermen), historically, but differ on how they interpret the traditions in rather conflicting ways. Despite, or maybe due to the even greater theological distance to the eastern sailor religion, there is no conflict between the kaildaper and eastern sailors.

Some crews are purely kaildaper crews for this reason.

Eastern ships grant land-based clergymen the right to minister to voyagers aboard, western ships do not. Western ships expect even clergymen to participate in western ritual. This is seldom, but sometimes, a problem.

Modern times

The long-term effects of these practices include:

• The emergence of two main sailor's trade union organization 'family trees'.
• Rather different structure of division of responsibility between the upper parts of the crew hierarchy in the two different unions.
• Many of the rituals survive even though few know or care about their meaning.
• Many superstitions about dangerous spirits on the sea are still held by significant numbers of sailors.
  

Herder religion

Among shepherds and other herders, certain ritual practices and beliefs are commonplace. Dogs are granted burials in dog burial grounds. Dogs that died fighting a predator get special rituals and special markers at their graves. Small sacrifices at dog burial grounds are a regular occurrence.

There are also rituals - some of them very short and low effort -  to participate in when slaughtering a sheep; when acquiring sheep; when acquiring an already trained dog; when acquiring an untrained dog; when going to sleep in the fields; when acquiring new pastures; when selling pastures; when having pastures; when encountering thunder; when encountering fog. The use of willow flutes also has some religious significance, as does the use of horns made from sheep or goat horns.

Although not fully uniform, the similarity of herder practices over the entire Dairwueh-Bryatesle word is remarkable.

Early industrial-worker religion

As industrialization lead to urbanization, rural practices entered towns and were mixed - and as living conditions changed, the practices also adapted to their times. Organized religion conserved some of the rituals and practices fairly well, but those beliefs and practices that were outside of the scope of the major religions quickly morphed. Traditional wolf-scaring rituals morphed into carnivals full of revelry; the springtime celebrations of the first harvestable edible things morphed into slightly less intense celebrations full of revelry. In general, industrial-worker religion tended to be quite full of revelry - but early industry in the DB world was quite lethal compared to all other work except that of the sailor.

Due to the amount of revelry involved, university students adopted some of the industrial-worker practices as well, but there is an amount of distrust between workers and students, as they often come from quite different class backgrounds. 

Miner religions

There are several mining-related systems of lore and ritual. There are even systems with miner monks. The miner religions are closely linked with mining engineering, the clergy essentially being mining engineers - but with required knowledge of the supernatural lore and rituals as well. Some miners are closely aligned with one or another system and will avoid working at mines where other ritual systems are prevalent. In some way, these are competing mining guilds which guard their knowledge carefully.

University religions

Universities tend to have their own identity, ritual systems, orders and hierarchies, and even beliefs. In the Dairwueh-Bryatesle world, the similarity to religion is even stronger than here, and in some sense the university ritual systems are essentially parallel religions. The university religion of course has two clearly separate blocks - the teachers and the students. Mostly, these have their own concerns, but on some occasions, the two blocks meet on an almost even footing in ritualized forms. Often including some level of revelry.

Medical doctors

In the DB world, medical doctors also have their own rituals, hierarchies and myths. Beliefs exist in this sphere as well, but evidence-based beliefs are mildly tolerated if they conflict with the historical medical dogma. Students of medicine do study at universities in the DB world, but tend to have their own separate system within the university world, unlike the other subjects.  

Detail #443: Doubly anchored kinship terms

 Some languages have compounds of e.g. "father" and "son" that express a group consisting of a father and a son. However, one could imagine a situation where a noun in fact conveys a single person (or multiple persons), characterized by their separate relationships to the speaker and the addressee or to some other referents.

Let's consider three generations, from oldest to younger: Anna, Beata and Cecilia.

Anna is mother and grandmother to Beata and Cecilia. Beata is daughter to Anna, and mother to Cecilia. Cecilia is daughter to Beata and granddaughter to Anna. 

Let us now imagine there being a word each of these can use when talking to the other to express both persons' relationships to the third. A simple compound could do the trick - grandchild-child, daughter-mother. This might sound a bit weird, but on the other hand, let's consider a different relation: grandchild-niece (Beata's sister Diana's daughter Emilia).

Of course, one could also consider how the relation to whom is marked - is it just 'our grandchild-niece' or is it "grandchild-mine-niece-yours"? If the simpler approach, does the grammar force some certain order? The oldest generation first? Some particular closeness first? Higher status first?

Maybe some of these words even have specialized lexemes that are not portmanteaus or compounds, but indivisible stems - that perchance are doubly possessed in a particular order?

And maybe it goes beyond relatives, and includes certain kinds of other formalized relations - spouses, in-laws, but also perhaps sworn allies of some kind, and as society progresses even colleagues?

 

Detail #376 Revisited: Quirky Adjectives

 In quirky adjectives I considered some quirky things adjectives can cause. Some new ideas that have occurred to me are:

• Offset gender, number or definiteness marking on the noun
• Specific adjectives that force plural marking on collective singular nouns
• Adjectives that cause nouns to have special case marking in comparisons
• Adjectives that force explicit plural marking (or explicit singular marking) on numerals.
• In a language where numerals are followed by singulars, consider 'the_pl honorable_pl five_pl members of this committee', and for a language where they're normally followed by singulars, 'the_sg honorable_sg five_sg member of this committee'. For the case with forced plural marking, consider the case 'the_pl honorable_pl one_pl member_pl of this committee'.
• Adjectives that change the scope of negation and quantifiers around them, while also having actual adjectival semantics. E.g. 'no student solved every ADJ task' - imagine the adjective here is something like 'damned', but also pulls along a change in scope such that it now means 'no student solved any task'.
• Words that syntactically are adjectives, but semantically are voice operators, so that e.g. a certain adjective specifies that the noun in fact is the marker makes both marks 'this clause is passive' and the agent of the clause by its mere presence. This could also perhaps work with e.g. tense as adjectives instead, such that e.g. multiple contrasting subjects of different tense (or even objects) could coexist. This isn't tense of NPs, this is tense of VPs marked as an adjectival marker inside the NP.
  

A Cwarmin-Ŋʒädär family universal

In Ćwarmin and Ŋʒädär and related languages, the fingers of the left and right hand are differentiated grammatically.

Those of the right hand are mandatorily possessed. Those of the left hand are, if applicable, mandatorily of the same degree of definiteness as the person to which they belong.

In certain eastern Bryatesle dialects, the same setup has emerged out of Bryatesle influence.

Dairwueh and Bryatesle: Subjects with adpositions and nominative postpositions

There are constructions in Dairwueh and Bryatesle where adpositions mark subjects. This is especially common in subordinate clauses, but not entirely unusual in main clauses either. Let us start out with the ones that work in both sub- and main clauses.

This essay has probably sat in the drafts folder for eight years by now so I figure it's time to publish it even though it's a bit rough.

1. The Dairwueh preposition 'teu'.

'Teu' has several uses, but the meanings nearly all derive from 'kind of'. A kind of, the kind of, some kind of, this kind of. It is very common when making categorical statements: teu darat tsem [...]

Its nature as a preposition is clear from the following facts: 

• its complement is in the locative-instrumental
• it can be coordinated with certain other prepositions
• it can take a preprepositional.
  
• The preprepositional argument marks the use for which the kind(s) are meant - e.g. kaubeng teu dorule = health kind-of food ~ types of food intended for  health
• It also marks a supercategory of which the thing is in a category "salar teu balin" - animal kind-of horse 'an animal, specifically a kind of horse'

2. Dairwueh burn and melt/dissolve

Not even in modern times does Dairwueh normally distinguish 'dissolve' from 'melt'. However, in chemistry and other contexts where the difference has some significance, the subject of 'dissolve' is often marked by the preposition yil (sometimes lo or əre), whereas melt tends to be reflexive. Similarly,  chemists tend to distinguish two types of burning by marking the subject with a preposition.

A fire with visible flames has a normal subject, chemical corrosion uses yil or lo.

 3. Bryatesle 'few'/'little'

In Bryatesle, 'few' operates syntactically as a postposition.  It normally takes the accusative case, with the ablative used when expressing the sense of 'too few'. They are also found in coordinations with the following postpositions or in similar positions

• with, without (as in 'in association with')
  
• full of
• instrumental adpositions

It cannot stand as the subject of a transitive verb, but can be the subject of an antipassive construction.

4. The Bryatesle 'associative preposition'

Although Bryatesle primarily has postpositions, the grammaticalization path that lead to the associative preposition caused it to end up on the other side. The associative preposition simply is a marker of metonymy. Not necessarily mandatory whenever metonymy is involved, but quite often used for that purpose.

5. Sometimes in comparisons

In both Bryatesle and Dairwueh, it happens that both the comparanda are marked by the comparative marker.

6. Presence of vocatives

The presence of a vocative in a clause can cause the subject to be marked by adpositions in both Bryatesle; primarily the postposition '(+abl) gyner'.

7. In some subordinated coordinated structures where subjecthood is unclear

8. Resumptive pronouns

Resumptive pronouns in relative subclauses almost always have the postposition 'gyner' in Bryatesle.

9. In subclauses specifying the place or time of something.

10. The Dairwueh preposition 'ne'.

This preposition can be used with subjects and objects, but has several functions, and is not triggered by things "outside of" the NP, unlike the previous examples.

 

So, in what way are these subjects and not adverbs that just are topicalized?

The main reason would be their syntactical effects. I will list the very subject-like ones first:

• Permit reflexive reference
• Cannot be coordinated with adverbs
• Can be coordinated over gaps with subjects
• Have subject-like scope
• Undergo raising like subjects do
  

However,  things that may look non-subject like include

• They block congruence on verbs
• The presence of an adpositional subject requires an adposition also in the complement of the copula in Bryatesle
• The preposition blocks the use of genitive for definite subjects in Dairwueh, and the neuter-ergative is blocked in Bryatesle.
•  Explicitly transitive verb forms are nearly never permitted
• The Bryatesle 'few', for instance, requires a detransitivized verb whenever the English corresponding sentence would have 'a few ...' be the subject of a transitive verb.