Detail #404: A Really Tiny Remnant of an Ergative System

The normal situation in an ergative language is that the absolutive case is the unmarked case, and one would expect a transition to nominative-absolutive to keep the absolutive as nominative.

However, in nom-acc languages, a grammar change that sometimes happens is "accusativism", the replacement of the nominative by the accusative form. We can imagine that a similar thing could happen with ergative turning into a nominative, and some other case replacing the accusative (or not at all).

For personal pronouns, it seems even less peculiar for something like that to happen - maybe the ergative and absolutive are suppletive anyways, and further case forms are formed by further suffixes, which could muddy the waters with regards to which form is more marked in the first place. So, after all that handwaving, let's posit this for the third person pronouns:

ERG -> NOM,
DAT -> ACC (or maybe ERG -> ACC)

A situation with ERG -> NOM, ABS -> ACC is not entirely impossible, and would enable what I am going for here, but I find it typologically fairly unlikely. Also, I imagine this idea would also work in an Iranian-style split ergativity.

Now, for the tiny remnant. Let's imagine the language requires dummy subjects sometime. Let's imagine that in this particular context, the old third person inanimate absolutive survives.

A Conreligious Detail: Migdaper Prayer Cycle

I have previously mentioned details about the Bryatesle-Dairwueh religions. This article presents one of these imaginary religions in greater detail. The BD religions form a religious union, whereby they consider each other valid forms of worship and belief. This example comes from one of the western branches of this complex of religions.

A Migdaper Prayer Tradition, and the Subversion of its Intent

Among the early migdaper sages, an important idea seems to have been that charity has four components: material charity, behavioral charity, verbal charity and mental charity: gifts of kindness, acts of kindness, words of kindness and thoughts of kindness.

When these four are practiced in parallel, righteousness increases. Different parts of the religious rituals are meant to increase this.

Daily communal prayer has been an established practice in the western bryatesle-dairwueh religions, probably since before the three modern western BD religions were established.

The daily prayer contains two almost fixed parts - the introduction and the end. These, however, are replaced by specific versions on holy days, and under certain other circumstances - war, famine, plagues, comets and other calamities, but also during harvest and sowing. If the community has a funeral, this is also reflected.

In between these, there are a few cycles. The festival cycle has special prayers for certain days, but is omitted on most days. The agricultural cycle follows the times of the year (and is tailored to local climates), but is omitted on some holy days.

In addition, there exist a few other types of cycles with different geographical distribution, and then the free parts - the leader of the congregation says a prayer loud that often covers recent themes, congregants may be invited to improvise or quote prayers they like (the frequency and number of congregants invited varies strongly), and a private, quiet prayer.

The most recent cycle to be almost universally shared among the migdaper is the "human cycle". A group of sages set out to gather prayers composed by people from every walk of life. The idea was that praying these prayers would teach empathy for those in different situations.

It is clear that the prayers were not entirely composed by the people they represent, but it seems beyond doubt that the sages did base the prayers on examples they encountered among the type of people represented by each prayer. After eliciting prayers, they seem to have done some poetic touch-ups, possibly some theological corrections and redacted them in other minor ways.

The relevant walks of life do not correspond entirely to occupations or social class, although many examples of that are included. Prayers can be found that originate with kings, warriors, orphans, bankers, scribes, sailors, fishermen, wives, caravan traders, farmers, a barren woman, widows, mothers grieving a lost child, the father of a heretic, a member of a "pagan" religion, a child, noblemen, the elderly, thieves, slaves, prostitutes and so on. The ones mentioned above are present in all the original variations of this cycle, among about fifty other near-universal walks of life.

There exist a few different sets of these of slightly different lengths - which is why I wrote "almost universally shared". Nearly all migdaper communities have some variation on this cycle, but there are differences in the number of prayers. The cycle was partially meant to have some stability, but also to permit for new walks of life.

An early book written by one of the originators of this cycle suggests that the cycle length should be kept steady in a community for as long as possible - any added prayers should be added to be said on the same day as some old prayer. Lengthening the cycle should only be done if the daily prayer gets exceedingly long. The book states that a cycle length is permissible as long as it is coprime with the length of the year, the length of the leap year and the length of the leap year cycle - but it is a preferrable cycle if it also is coprime with the length of any sum of one leap year and one, two, three, four or five normal years as well.

This should guarantee that all walks of life get their prayers said on all the holy days at some point. In the eyes of God, and in the eyes of the religious calendar, all humans are equally precious, and so should be equal in this cycle.

This might seem like a nice enough sentiment, but the practice is broken in four different ways, and quite intentionally: failure to attend, rioting during attendance, manipulation of the cycle and omission of the prayer. On the day of the prayer of the prostitute, and to a lesser extent those of the thief and the slave, attendance often drops significantly - in places with many migdaper prayer houses that follow different cycles, other houses whose cycle is at a different point sometimes see quite an increased attendance. The prayer of the prostitute is sometimes also met with loud derision and even riots in the houses of prayer.

Some communities refuse to read these prayers on holy days. Different solutions exist: either, saying the offensive prayer on the same day as another offensive prayer during years when they would coincide, just dropping them altogether from the cycle on those years, or shortening / lengthening the cycle by adding or moving some prayers around in it for the sake of not giving prostitutes, slaves and thieves the honour of having their prayers said on holy days. Some particularly brazen congregations have removed these prayers altogether from the prayer cycle. One congregation does nominally keep these prayers in the cycle - but has no communal prayer on those days except if they are holy days, in which case the prayers are omitted.

In some cases, where a leader of a congregation has read the prayer on holy days despite disapproval, the congregants have celebrated the holy day anew the next day, to mark that they consider it as if the holy day did not take place at all as the taint from the prayer of prostitute is enough to cancel all holiness.

It is notable that these three prayers are not in any way explicit, nor do they advocate anything that anyone finds offensive. Notably, the prayer that generates the greatest offense generally is the prayer of the prostitute, and secondarily that of the slave.

Detail #403: Number Distinction on Plural Personal Pronouns

Let us consider a language where the plural personal pronouns are formed using two strategies: plural morphemes and root suppletion.

Thus, something like

I, wes - me, us(e)s
thou, yes - thee, yous
he, she, it, theys - him, her, it - thems

In fact, Finnish is not all too far off from this: in most cases (with the exception of the nominative), the plural pronouns have the -i- plural marker in the expected position. Finnish is also weird by having the nominative/accusative plural marker -t be the accusative marker for pronouns - but even with that present, the other plural marker is present for the plurals.

Anyways, in many languages, there are situations where morphological number is suppressed - one common position for that is after quantifiers (seeing as the quantifier makes the plural superfluous).

We could thus imagine situations where we get

wes saw thems
some of us saw many of them

Now, we can take one additional step to make this idea moderately interesting. Not all the pronouns need to have suppletive plural roots, maybe he and it have no distinct plural root, so "they(masc)" is hes and "they(neut)" is its.

I saw its
I saw hims
I saw three of it
I saw several of him

 

Detail #402: Gender-congruent Nouns under Possession

Gender congruence in adjectives is sort of old-hat. However, let's consider a gender congruence that affects the gender of the main noun instead.¹

Let's assume some nouns, such as "looks", "face", "appearance" - nouns that simply have to do with the visuals of a person - and maybe nouns that have to do with the mental facets of a person - "soul", "mind", "mood", etc - change gender whenever they are possessums.

brother-masc.gen face.masc

sister-fem.gen face.fem 

However, in isolation there is a default gender these nouns take. Maybe they're all neuters or something. 

This far, the idea isn't particularly complex or anything - and this seems to be a realistic quirk whereby some nouns denoting certain aspects of a person agrees in gender with that person - nothing weird at all.

How about plurals? Here, we can imagine several possible situations.

1. If the language conflates genders in the plural

Maybe this forces coordinations in cases where mixed gender is implied:

their face-masc and face-fem

maybe

their face-masc.pl and face-fem.pl

or maybe singulars are used for these nouns - thus making them overspecify gender while underspecifying number.

And maybe this also permits shared things: their appearance.sg, although maybe there is a forced plural congruence so you must say "their appearance.pl" even if the intended meaning is singular.

If one wants to say that someone has multiple faces, maybe using forced discongruence and coordination could be a solution:

he has face-masc.acc and face-fem.acc
he is two-faced

However, this imho sounds like claiming he does drag, and so

he has face-masc.acc and face-masc.acc

seems more like it would imply twofacedness. "He has faces" would sort of be blocked by the congruence rule - although one could imagine that the use of incongruent nouns in this case would convey a rather marked meaning - viz. that of having two (conflicting) faces.

2. If the language distinguishes genders in the plural

Here, we can imagine more combinations: their.fem appearance.sg.fem implies a shared appearance, their.fem appearance.pl.fem implies the appearances of each of them taken as a group. Number discongruence with gender congruence may be used to indicate a variety of things (a person of many faces, or many people of one appearance), and gender discongruence would probably not be used all that much.

Finally, if the nouns normally are neuter, one could imagine that masculine or feminine forms are used as a sort of derivation that implies, say female or male looks, faces, etc in specific without necessarily talking about a specific face.

Finally, a question: can we create a distribution that is "alignment-like" out of this idea?

¹ Yes, I am aware that in some languages, syntactic analysis indicates that the genitive noun is higher up in the syntactic hierarchy, but let's ignore that for now.

Real Language Examples: The Case of the Complement and Logic

Preamble

I recently started a blog in Swedish, where I discuss - from a serious linguistically informed point of view - some of the common prescriptive notions that Swedish prescriptivists like advancing. It often turns out that their reasoning and their underlying claims are flawed. The approach consists of cutting out the illogical fluff that besets the debate, and focus on which actual arguments are valid.

This post is a translation/rework of such a post. It's probably not the best translation ever, and I will probably improve it every now and then. It is not only a translation from one language to another, it's a translation from one purpose to another - the usual reader of this blog probably is rather descriptivist rather than prescriptivist, and now, instead of illustrating that an argument is wrong, I want to illustrate a way of thinking about arguments more generally.

I will focus on a particular argument here and debunk it thoroughly. Many descriptivists would probably just shrug it off with a statement like "well, yeah, but language doesn't have to be logical" or something like that. My aim is to illustrate that the argument we are faced with is itself not logical despite having the trappings of a logical argument, and that it can be debunked using logic. Language is logical in some way, it's just that the rules it lives under are rather more complex than those of Logic 101 homework.

The Topic and the Bad Argument

A question that sometimes causes some disagreement in English is the case of the complement of the copula. In effect, is it "it is me" or "it is I"? To compare with a different language, in most varieties of Swedish, it is "det är jag" - i.e. "it is I". There is no controversy in Swedish whether this is correct in the standard language, and most dialects also follow this pattern. The situation in English is of course less clear-cut, although some prescriptivists might think it ought to be entirely clear-cut.

This of course leads to a fair share of disagreement in the anglosphere - grammar nazis can have a hard time accepting two permissible options, or even wrapping their minds around more complicated situations where multiple factors interact. In this situation, any argument - no matter how bad - becomes ammunition in the conflict.

One argument that I've found an anglophone prescriptivist voice in favour of the use of the nominative is that "is" equates, and therefore the subject and complement must be of the same case. Here, as a quote, is the complete chain of reasoning:

"Is" equates. Equals should be similar. What's on the left side of "is" is the subject. What's on the right side is therefore subjective case, not objective. Is that a simple enough rationale for you? Somebody else can give you historical background on how and when this perfectly logical rule came into being.

Clearly, logic is the first, best stop for an answer regarding questions such as this - and this sure looks like an argument from logic, doesn't it? It uses simple, undeniable premises and reaches a clear conclusion without any frills.

Yet, as it turns out this argument relies on a very flawed application of logic! It lacks several premises, and does not really reach the conclusion it pretends to reach. It is rather similar in some sense to the naturalistic fallacy: "things ought to be (represented linguistically) in a way that reflects their natural characteristics" is a mistake, and how much more so the notion that expressing similarity should have the elements be similar. "She resembles me" has 'me' in the accusative and 'she' in the nominative despite expressing similarity. Besides, no one has ever bridged the is-ought gap.

Clearly, the statement is fairly universal in its nature as well - it relies on such fundamental building blocks that it should be applicable in nearly any language, and on nearly any sentence linking two nouns by "is" or its corresponding words in other languages - "is" should, if it holds, always and only link nouns of the same case. Does it?

The car is John's.
Honey, I'm home.

I concede that the second example is somewhat iffy, but "home" in that use clearly is some sort of unmarked locative. Sure, you might say "home" is an adverb, but clearly that would also violate it - it's a noun acting adverbially linked to a personal pronoun by a verb that equates, or it's a personal pronoun being equated with an adverb. Both fail the premise that is equates.

If we take the rule as it was stated literally, it does also ban "The car is John's" though - the two nouns are not of the same case. Any objection to my objection literally signifies that the rule is incomplete (and any completion will at least in part violate its basic form quite strongly.)

We can further note that prepositions fundamentally are not significantly different from case marking; some linguistic literature doesn't even really distinguish, say "allative" from "on X". Yet,

"I am on it", "he was at Seagrave's", "she's in town", "Eric's on drugs", ...

are not blocked by this. Curious, isn't it. Of course, in languages that deal with locatives and such through case forms, these will also violate the "is-links-same-case" rule a lot of the time. 

Even if we reject the idea that prepositions are cases, we still find reason to reject "is" linking same-with-same:

He is with me right now. (Not "he is with I right now", which would literally fulfill the requirement.)

Now, one could object that I am misinterpreting something - "is [noun]" and "is [prepositional phrase]" are different uses of is! But this by itself only strengthens my argument - it shows that the claim '"Is" equates. Equals should be similar."' fundamentally fails. The objection to my argument basically concedes that "is equates except when it doesn't". The rule is way too simple, and hides many important facts about is and other copulas.

How about

woe is me

mir ist kalt ('me.dat is cold', "I am (feeling) cold")
Min Gud är mig en väldig borg ("my god is me a mighty castle" - "my god is a mighty castle for me")

Further, we can show that is is not a strict equality thus:

((is) ≡ (≡))  → (the house is red) ≡ (the house ≡ red)
(the house ≡ red) ∧ (the apple ≡ red) → (the house ≡ the apple)
:= the house is the apple.

In other words, if it's true that is equates, it follows that if the house is red, and the apple is red, the house is the apple. The point here is basically that you just can't translate 'is' into a simple logical operation. Doing so leads to bizarre conclusions, and therefore is has to be something that is different from ≡, in such a way that is can be used to express the idea that ≡ expresses, without being the same operation. This means any "syntactical" considerations that  ≡ carries may be ignored. Among these are the notion that the left and right side may be marked in different ways to show distinctions. Maybe differences in scope are marked by different cases.

Further, if is equates, the right and left side of is should be equivalent, in which case it should be acceptable to switch their order.

The house is red. / Red is the house.
Huset är rött / Rött är huset.

Both of these do work in Swedish and English, but "red" does not serve the same syntactical role as "the house" does, and thus they cannot be equivalent.

The house is red and stands by a beautiful lake.
?Red is the house and stands by a beautiful lake.

The house is red and the house stands by a beautiful lake.
*Red is the house and red stands by a beautiful lake.

We can further notice the following:

a) The captain is a woman.
b) A woman is the captain.
c) A woman the captain (indeed) is.
d) *The captain a woman (indeed) is.

 

Granted, some of these do sound like cheap lines in an amateur production of a story about 18th century pirates with a female at the helm. However, they are syntactically parsable with meaningful distinctions for most speakers of English: a) is unmarked or can convey some surprise, b) could convey some surprise or at the very least highlights that this is somewhat unusual, and c) affirms in some way (either positive or sarcastic) the fact.

These three acceptable utterances have pragmatic distinctions - the information structure of these three utterances are different. If "is" only equated, this would not make sense. Besides, if "is" only equated, d) should also be acceptable.

Empirical data:

1. Danish

In good danish, "it is me" ('det er meg') is acceptable.

2. Russian and Polish

Since I am describing two languages, this description is a sort of average of the two - not entirely accurate for either, but close enough for government work.

In Russian and Polish, noun complements of the copula often are in the instrumental. Adjectives more often are nominative, but in some contexts, they too seem to favour (or even require) the instrumetal. Both the Russian and Polish copula are cognates to the English be/is forms. (C.f. be ~ być, быть, is ~ jest, есть.)

Further, these languages sometimes have quirky case subjects that are not nominative, for instance the Russian 'to have to', надо. With надо, the 'subject' is in the dative - yet complements of надо быть do not agree with the subject in case. Clearly быть does not "strictly" equate.

3. Finnish

In Finnish, the copula can take either nominative or partitive - the subject usually being nominative.

Sometimes, other cases are uses - e.g. the "into a role" case, the translative:

hän ei ole lääkäriksi
he/she is not "into the role of doctor" > (s)he isn't suited to be a doctor

The subject in this construction could also be in the ablative:

hänestä ei ole lääkäriksi
from him/her is not into role of doctor -> (s)he isn't "doctor material".

Much like Russian, Finnish also has verbs whose subjects are not nominative:

häne-n on pakko olla hullu
his/hers has to be mad
(s)he has to be mad
not
*häne-n on pakko olla hullu-n
his/hers has to be mad's

When stating age in years, the opposite holds: the numeral is in the genitive, but the subject in the nominative: hän on viiden - (s)he is five.

Furthermore, the Finnish copula can take partitive subjects when you make existential statements, and when specifying quantities it is mandatory:

heitä oli viisi
*he olivat viisi
*heitä oli viisiä
*heitä oli viittä
they.part were five.nom

No matter what kind of group is being quantified, the subject is partitive and the numeral is in the singular nominative - Finnish has plural nominatives and singular and plural partitives for every number so that gets a bit confusing.

Further, like many languages, Finnish does not have a separate verb for "have", but forms that meaning by using 'to be' and some kind of locative - in Finnish it's the allative, -llA, "by, at, on". "Tuomolla on kirkasta" - "by Tuomo is clear.part", "Tuomo has vodka" - linking a noun in the allative to a noun in the partitive in this particular instance!

4. Many languages in Africa

In Africa, many languages have copulas whose "complements" syntactically and formally actually are objects. (NB: in many of these languages, nouns do not have case, but ~case is conveyed by a verb marked that agrees in gender with the noun.)

5. Swedish

But wait a moment, I stated previously that Swedish takes the nominative? Well, even Swedish raises some objections to the "is equates" model! I will use English word-for-word translations to make it easier for non-Swedish readers to keep up. I am not making statements about English grammar in this section.

Reflexives - "I am myself" - "jag är mig själv" - is perfectly accepted by the standard grammars. "Jag är jag" is also possible, but has slightly different connotations. All reflexives in Swedish are accusative.

In the third person, though, "He wants to be he" means something entirely different from "he wants to be himself". "He wants to be he" requires the two "he" pronouns to have different referents, and signifies that the first wants to become the second. "He wants to be himself", " does not state that two different referents are one, it states that he wants to be (back to) his (usual) self. Thus, to express the notion that he wants to be his own self, the rules require one to use the accusative reflexive.

I have further tried finding rules for the construction "let me be me" in Swedish. In English, it seems the is equates rule actually "seems" to be applied here (or rather, most people probably go for "be me" anyway, and those who think is equates think that's why it should be me there. The underlying mechanisms are indistinguishable from the regular speaker in this case). I feel like "vara jag" (= be I) is more natural in this context, in which case the is equates principle fails in the somewhat unusual other direction: an accusative notional subject with a nominative complement!

6. English

I am not going to point to the actual fact that the overwhelming majority seem to be entirely okay with "it is me". The examples I want to attract attention to are syntactically a bit more complicated.

Would you want to be me?

I found very few examples (in fact none) of this with the complement in the nominative. I am pretty sure some instances of this must be the result of equates-believers - certainly someone who believes it should be "it is I" must have written a sentence with "would ... want to be [personal pronoun]". I may not have searched diligently enough, but this at least indicates that for most people, the intuitive case to use with the copula is the accusative even if they believe that they use the equating strategy.

One step further, we find

606 000^g it is hard to be me
0^g it is hard to be I

The numeral followed by a superscript g stands for number of google hits.

We could of course also look at the syntax of equating - it should require "it would be hard for him to be me" to become "it would be hard for him to be for me", since "for me" is the PP that is equated with the complement of the copula.

One nice thing to note about the above example is that either we posit some ethereal subject that has a hard time being me, or we posit that to be in it doesn't equate anything with me. Again, "is equates" fails.

My conclusion from these examples is that the natural case for complements in English indeed is the accusative. Using the nominative is a learned affectation that fails for almost everyone whenever the syntax has the tiniest complication. Luckily, most situations with complications involve a noun in the accusative, and so the "accusative is right" and "equal case is right" become indistinguishable in most of those situations. Luckily, a few constructions do exist that show that it's more likely that the "accusative is right" rule is more fundamental to English grammar.

An improved model

It is in fact easy to posit a model that accounts for the syntactical and semantic behavior of the copula without having to resort to the principle I set out to argue against. In addition, the principle I set out to argue against leads to bizarre conclusions, and does not fit with actual empirical evidence.

One of the roles of the copula is simply to signify that the subject is being described by an element that is syntactically subordinate to the copula. This element's case (and sometimes the case of the subject as well) can be controlled by the copula or by syntactic and semantic factors. Other particles and elements may also inform us of the function of the copula (e.g. "There ..." in English turning it into an existential quantifier). The copula can be used to tell of ownership ("is John's"), membership in a group ("is one of us", "is one of the best cooks", "is a freemason"), age ("on viiden"), quantity ("heitä on viisi"), adjectival properties ("the house is red"), location ("I'm inside", "honey, I'm home"), existence, and further serve as an auxiliary (future tense with imperfective infinitives in Russian, obligation with genitive subjects and participles in Finnish, ....)

The advantages of this model is that it's actually applicable to actual real existing languages. It won't fail as soon as you attempt to apply it to Finnish or Russian or honest-to-God English. It also is applicable even to a language that actually completely maintains case equality, or to a language that always requires the complement to be nominative.

Granted, unlike the "is equates" model, the only prediction we can get out of this model is that 'languages will vary'. But, if we assume an empirical approach, it's better if our model makes general but true predictions than if it fails arguably even for the language it attempts to describe, but certainly for a multitude of other languages as well. "Is equates" was an acceptable hypothesis, but once it's proven wrong, we shouldn't use it anymore except for the conclusions we could reach by investigating it.

Conclusion

We can see that the argument that was presented as a logical cause of a grammatical rule is based in a flawed understanding of both logic and language. This is not unusual.

In Swedish, it is "it is I", but not because it's logical - it is thus because that's how Swedish works. In English, it's unstable. Flawed logical arguments should not be used to tar one of the two alternatives as bad or illogical - doing that would actually be illogical. The linguistic intuitions of the speaker community should be the basis for this. It would be a sad day indeed if crappy logic were given a victory just because it looks scientific. It would basically be conceding the victory to pseudoscience and pseudologic.

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 #401: Finite verbs, infinitives and ...

I have recently taken to writing longer, even more typologically informed posts that sit around in my drafts folder waiting to be finished. One such post will be about infinitives and related forms.

My original intent with the post was a bit less ambitious than it now is, and the original ideas I set out to give a context for now seem to fit better in a separate post altogether.

Let us consider finite verbs and infinitives. This is a very simple two-way split. Could we turn it into a three-way split?

It's of course easy to write a half-assed description in a grammar that says something like "this form is half-way between a finite verb and an infinite verb" - but half-way along what dimensions? What dimensions even separate the two kinds?

It turns out infinitives vary a lot from language to language, and not all languages even have them. However, one could possibly design the verb system in such a way that there are forms with different properties, and the verb forms form three or four clusters.

Maybe one could even get rid of the notion of a finite verb with some clever decisions, and instead distribute the properties that generally characterize a finite verb to two or three other verb forms that have to be combined in order to achieve a properly finite VP?

Of course participles, verbal nouns, converbs, coverbs, conegatives, gerunds, forms that just get called "infinitive III" or the like, etc have a lot of different coordinates in "verb property space" - and these may not even be uniform from language to language or even dialect to dialect - and sometimes, they even come close enough to finite verb space to cross over that line. 

The challenge for a conlanger, as I see it, is getting distinct clusters. Once my post on infinitives is done, I may write a follow-up that attempts coming up with some way of mapping "verb form space" onto three clusters (or four) in "verb property space".

Detail #400: Converbs and Alignment-like phenomena

Converbs are essentially verb forms that have some form of adverbial use. In some way one could also say they are "cases for verbs". They often mark things such as "condition on which the main verb depends", "action that was enabled by the predicate", "action that enabled the predicate", "... preceded ...", "... followed ...", "... coincided with ...", etc. There is a lot of possibilities with converbs, and I may write a post going into some of that later on.

However, let's think a bit about the relationship between the converb and the main verb. We can divide all sentences in the world into two types:

1. No converb is present.
2. One or more converbs are present.

We can imagine a system with a handful of different converbs, maybe the following:

• conditional
• simultaneous
• in order to
• as a result of
  
• until the end of
• from the end of
• temporarily doing

What if a clause with no converb usually does not mark its predicate verb with the usual finite markers, but with one particular converb's forms, thus giving us a slightly "ergative-like" pattern, where "normal verb inflections" are ergative, and that particular converb is "absolutive"? Maybe there can be two converbs that can have that "absolutive" role, with a differential morphology thing going: maybe "simultaneous" usually just means "happens", whereas "temporarily" means "habitually or on-and-off".

We can consider other factors also that trigger which pattern is used: maybe some persons take the regular finite verb, or inanimates take some of the converbs for predicates except if there's some "real" converb present?

Detail #399: Some notes on pro-verbs

One of the things conlangers come up with every now and then - and which really do exist, even - are the verbal equivalents of pronouns.

I am not sure whether there is any "formal" definition of such a pro-verb that is very specific - I figure linguists recognize them when they see them, and I doubt there's much actual formal need, usually at least - to study these as a category of verbs.

I imagine it might be common in languages to have different types of "do" - maybe distinguished by a variety of factors: aspect, transitivity, expected type of result. Like pronouns, I find it likely that pro-verbs would not be "entirely normal" verbs - but rather of the kind that can be auxiliaries (much like pronouns can be determiners) and may be defective (like pronouns may) or have richer systems of inflection (like pronouns may). However, "do" altered along those dimensions is not the only possible pro-verb.

An obvious type of pronoun to look into is the demonstrative pronoun. "What you this.verb" - what is this that you are doing?, "you this.verb any result" - 'does doing this have any result'. Demonstrative adverbs ('thus', 'like this') could of course also reasonably be verbal: thus.verb.imperative: do thus!, [like this].verb.interrog: like this?, 'you thus.verb.interrog? I always this.verb!" - "do you do like that? I do it this way."

Another obvious one is the interrogative verb - essentially "what are you doing", though one could also imagine that "how" could  be an auxiliary - in which case a nice system with the demonstratives of manner emerges.

One could of course go further and go for the indefinite pronouns: nothing, something, anything. Here, I recommend reading the post on the typology of indefinite pronouns! "What.verb.2sg?" "Nothing.verb.1sg". "Just anything.verb.imp!", "They something.verb.past.3sg".

Other indefinite pronouns and determiners - like 'other', 'whatever', 'this, that and the other', 'either', 'none', 'neither', could easily lend themselves to verbs.

For a further twist, how about relative verbs? One could of course use them as markers of subclauses in general - an auxiliary that always occurs in a relative subclause - but one could also imagine them as a way of introducing relative subclause-like information about a verb.

bats fly which.verb.3pl birds also
I tired am which.verb.1sg always in the evenings

 

And finally - possessive pronouns. I imagine these would be a bit like the "yours"/"mine"/... variety of English possessive pronouns, and signify "the action you/I/etc...am doing. In this case "stop.imperative mine.verb.infinitive" would mean "stop imitating me/doing what I am doing". "Mine.verb.imperative" would mean "imitate me".

There's of course tons of ways in which these could be extended with normal verbal affixes, imagine

"she always knew pre-mine.verb.participle"
she always knew what I was about to do

"he always re-theirs.verb.participle"
he always redoes what they do

 

These are but some ideas related to this topic. I am not sure including all of them in a conlang would be a good idea, but a nice subset with some nice extensions and quirks could be pretty cool.

Detail #398: Evidentials in Reasonable, but Unusual Places

Evidentials appear in many languages of the world. Many languages have them as an integral part of the verb morphology, but a slightly more limited distribution is not entirely inconceivable. I have been thinking a bit about what particular types of words and constructions may be likely to attract evidential marking. I make no claim as to completeness.

 Such, thus.

Such and thus are interesting - they're partially adjectives/adverbs, partially demonstratives. Basically shorthand for "like that" or "like this". Some languages have the same levels of deixis for their correlate, such as Swedish "så(da)n där/så(da)n här" which perfectly maps onto den här/den här. "Så här", "så där" basically provides two forms of 'thus' with a deictic distinction.
So, with these, some types of statements may actually invite evidentiality.

Conjunctions.

Particularly conjunctions that introduce subclauses.

The copula.

Certain adjectives and nouns relating to status in the eye of the law

criminal, murderer, etc, but also possibly statuses that aren't directly connected to culpability: heir-to-be, engaged, bastard

 

Detail #397: Discourse Particles as ... Auxiliaries, Subjects, Objects, and other Decidedly Non-Particly Words

So, discourse particles are a thing that have decidedly been given a stepmotherly treatment in English. A similar disdainful view does exist in Swedish, even though it'd seem Swedish does have more dedicated discourse markers than English does. By 'dedicated discourse marker' I mean a word that cannot also be used in other ways.

As an example of the disdain I am talking of, when the Swedish pop-sci linguistics magazine Språket ('Language') published an article about discourse particles, the discussion in a variety of online language groups was decidedly hostile, people saying this was the final drop re: that magazine, people thinking it dumb that someone defend such frivolous words, etc.

I believe this disdain for them, this view of them as something to be avoided and even scorned, as a sign of low intelligence or lack of education is something that may affect the willingness conlangers have to use them in interesting ways.

I am not saying we share the prejudice, I am saying the prejudice just subtly steers us away from thinking about them, in part because there's less material about them.

So, how about changing their word classes to something more respectable?

1. Auxiliaries

Pretty much what it says on the tin. However, one can imagine some further twists: maybe they also entirely replace some verbs, such as copulas. They might "cut across" verbs depending on a variety of factors.

Imagine, for instance, a verb "hæm" that replaces "have" in the case of first person subjects with an NP after, but 'are, is' in the case of other persons:

I hæm a solution -> oh, I have a solution
you hæm a teacher -> oh, you are a teacher
I hæm eaten already -> oh, I have already eaten
you hæm eaten already -> oh, you have already eaten

These could also be secondary-rank auxiliaries or primary-rank ones - depending on how they act in combination with other auxiliaries.

2. Anti-auxiliaries and second-rate auxiliaries

An anti-auxiliary would force any other verb to behave like its auxiliary, and then trigger word order such as that of aux + subordinated verb.

3. Subjects

A discourse particle acting as a subject will of course push every other argument down, possibly such that subjects become indirect objects, objects maybe stay as such (or can be demoted to obliques), and indirect objects either are demoted to direct objects or obliques.

4. Object, indirect objects

Similar to the previous one. In the case of (di)transitive verbs, you get some kind of demotion of the actual (indirect) object.

6. Some kind of sliding NP

These would pick the first free slot - subject, object, indirect object,  (or maybe io and o switch places in the hierarchy), or some kind of olbique. These could have some kind of "stopping point" which they won't be demoted past, and from that point on they cause the effects described above.

7. Adjectives

An adjectival discourse particle would mark congruence with nouns, or at the very least have the syntactical properties of an adjective. Maybe they could even be used as complements of verbs, i.e. an adjective that means 'yeah, sure' and behaves adjectivally:

The yeah-sure.neut car.neut was on fire
yeah, sure, the car was on fire

the car.neut that burned down was yeah-sure.net
yeah, sure, it was the car that burned down!

8. Clitics

I am just mentioning clitics to exhaust the low-hanging fruit.

Detail #396: Antideranking

In many languages, subclauses and main clauses have somewhat different properties. The differences may appear in any number of subsystems - word order, morphosyntactical alignment, verb conjugation, pro-drop rules.

Sometimes, complexions exist - different types of subclauses may behave differently (relative subclauses being one reasonable exceptional subtype), and sometimes, subclause behaviors may also pop up in main clauses: morphosyntactical alignment, for instance, sometimes is ergative in all subclauses and in some main clauses with some TAMs. Verbal modes that typically appear in subclauses may also signal something if they pop up in main clauses.

If I have properly understood the terminology, deranking seems to be a term used to describe systems whereby a subordinate thing has distinctive features, such as the ones listed above.

My proposition is to have a similar distinction, such that main clauses with subordinate clauses (of some types) are distinct from subclauses and from all other main clauses. Maybe some specific 'superordinate' verb forms, maybe some specific word order (I would not be surprised if a superordinate clause has stricted word order!).

Subordinate clauses with further subordinate clauses would be considered superordinate as well, but could potentially showcase non-conflicting features from both, e.g. strict SVO[SUBCLAUSE] word order due to being superordinate, but ergative alignment due to being subordinate.

Detail #395: A Way of Forming Genitive Constructions

So, I came across a quote from some text today that stated that "the genitive case seems to have survived linguistic evolution moreso than other cases in Europe because of the desire to communicate association and possession between nouns". I already have discarded the tab where it was quoted ages ago, so I am not sure about the exact wording and looking for it would be tedious and it was in Swedish so it's not like it'd be of much use to anyone, and it was old - it was in 18th century Swedish. Whatever may be the case, it made me think a bit about genitive-like constructions, and I came up with one I have not seen elsewhere.

So, in English and Swedish, the genitive marker occupies the same syntactic slot as articles. You can't say "Enid's the car" and by that mean 'the car of Enid's', as contrasted to 'Enid's a car' for 'a car of Enid's'.

Now, in some languages - Finnish among them - genitives behave more like adjectives. You can, in fact, place some attributes of a noun on the other side of the genitive in Finnish. Thus, the genitive in Finnish is "more clearly" inside the NP than they are in Swedish and English (where they arguably rather are parts of a DP that surround the NP).

Now, what if genitives were not marked, but were located inside the NP, and the language had explicit articles. Let's imagine the articles have a similar allomorphy as they do in English:

an a man cave: a cave of a man
the a man cave: the cave of a man
the the man cave: the cave of the man
a the man cave: a cave of the man

In a language with gender markers on the articles, this might be more likely to occur, as the relationships between the nouns and the articles would be easier to unpack.

Detail #394: A Detail in a Language with Subject and Object Verb Marking

Let us consider a language that has both of those; let us further consider the language to have two reflexive markers, one for singular subjects, the other for plural subjects.

A further detail: the number congruence for the subject marker follows morphological number (at least almost all of the time), whereas the object marker follows semantic number (so, e.g. 'family', when speaking of the family as a bunch of individuals, will have plural congruence, but when speaking of it as an entity, will have singular congruence).

And the final piece of setup before we get to the thing I want to describe: there are two reflexive markers that can fill the object slot. One for singulars, the other for plurals.

(N.B. the language could conceivably also have duals, but they will not affect the detail I am about to describe, and so I will not mention them any further.)

Now, we can imagine that in some language, a group X having Y as a member  can be expressed as 'X having Y'. For some contexts, this even works in English, so it shouldn't be particularly weird.

However, one could imagine that the particular construction mentioned there gets weird here:

X have-3pl-refl.1sg Y

and, one could even imagine, that this ignores the actual number of Y, that the (1/2/3)pl-refl.1sg affix on certain verbs simply signify 'have/acquire/... as a member or part'.

I considered working this idea into some Dagurib language, since those will, I think, have object congruence, ... however, with the pace at which my current conlangs are being developed, Dagurib might start getting done when I turn 120.

Detail #393: A Way of Marking Imperatives (and possibly optatives and jussives and the like)

In some languages, there's congruence. Sometimes, this congruence also applies to, say, complements.

Some languages have vocatives!

Now we get the spin: imagine a language with a non-zero marked vocative, and congruence on verbal complements. Now, the next step could be forming the imperative by having an (implicit) secondnd person vocative, and some non-finite verb taking vocative congruence on it.

Next step: specifying the vocative subject would naturally be parsed as third person (or first person) imperative, and those easily become optatives or jussives instead.

Detail #392: A Twist on Adpositions

I recently mentioned I have been fascinated recently with the notion of adpositions that take two arguments. However, an even odder twist occurred to me, and is inspired by a detail in Biblical Hebrew! (N.B: This construction apparently does exist in modern Hebrew as well, but some cursory research indicates it's not as common as some other constructions.)

The preposition that inspired me is 'between', in Hebrew בֵּֽינְ (bayin). The thing is, when you have two or more NPs, the preposition is doubled (though with a conjunction), essentially producing a structure like this:

between a rock and between a hard place

From an Anglocentric p.o.v., this would seem almost nonsensical. Indeed, 'between' seems a contender for a preposition that requires more than one argument (semantically, albeit not syntactically).

However, an adposition that either requires a non-singular object or coordination with another prepositional phrase opens some interesting doors: what if there were adpositions that require coordination either with some other adposition or an adverb?

Let us imagine a preposition that marks stretches in time. I will write it 'prep', for now. Examples that illustrate its use. Words that in English straddle the line between adverb and noun will here be strictly adverbial, and be marked by asterisks.

prep summer and prep winter: from summer to winter
today* and prep sunday: from today to sunday
prep morning and tomorrow*: from the morning to tomorrow

However, in situations where the same noun stands for both end points, the preposition has to be doubled:

prep and prep mornings
from morning to morning

Real Language Examples: Discongruence in Swedish

One reason I am taking many examples from Swedish is the fact that most readers know English. (How's that for an understatement.) The grammar of Swedish is in many ways very similar to English. Sure, the morphology differs in many ways - but  the number of things morphologically expressed does not differ by any great amount. In simple terms: it takes very little work to explain a basic part of Swedish grammar to someone who knows English and is interested in linguistics.

Finnish or Russian will take more effort.

So, now that's out of the world, let's go to the topic of the day: congruence and discongruence. Turns out Swedish can be said to have a few different discongruences:

1. Gender discongruence in verb phrases with copulas. This communicates some information about how the noun and adjective relate but is strongly restricted as to when it can be used. 
2. Gender discongruence with the masculine -e, which sometimes can be used with reference to gender-neutral nouns that are known to refer to a woman, in certain circumstances.
3. Definiteness discongruence, alternatively not really a discongruence but something that looks like it.
4. Two adjectives that have a weird orthographic quirk that causes a seeming failure to mark congruence, but in most speakers' intuition and reading do mark congruence.
5. Adjectives that conflate some or all forms
6. Adjectiveswith morphological gaps.

In addition, we will look at the curiosity of "liten" and "små", a suppletive adjective whose cognates in English should be fairly obvious.

We shall begin by surveing the Swedish congruence system with regards to adjectives and determiners.

The Swedish gender system

Swedish has a gender system that can be described as follows:

[neuter]    vs.    [masculine, feminine and common]

The masculine, feminine and common mostly take the same congruence markers, with -e being a somewhat restricted masculine marker (-a can almost always replace it, though).

A similar gender system has emerged in some other Scandinavian languages and in Dutch. Many Swedish and Norwegian dialects retain the three-gender system of old Norse (and proto-Germanic, and Indo-European ...). What happened in Swedish, Danish, some Norwegian and Dutch is that inanimate nouns were ousted from the masculine and feminine genders, but were not welcomed into the neuter gender. A new "common" gender was formed. In the North Germanic languages, the common gender therefore shows some similarities with the masculine and feminine genders. However, it also shows some similarities with the neuter gender (e.g. sharing the genitive pronoun 'dess', and having de- as the root for the pronouns, det being neuter, den common, c.f. masculine and feminine han and hon).

The Swedish noun phrase congruence system

In the noun phrase, articles and pronominal determiners always inflect for the gender of the noun:

en bil, ett hus, en man, ett tak. (A car, a house, a man, a roof).

With indefinite nouns, adjectives take similar suffixes:

en röd bil, en grön bil, en gammal bil (a red|green|old car)

ett vitt hus, ett grönt hus, ett gammalt hus (a white|green|old house)

en röd man, en grön man, en gammal man (a red|green|old man)

ett rött tak, ett grönt tak, ett gammalt tak (... roof).

Most pronominal determiners also take the same markers

någon röd bil (some red car)

något vitt hus (some white house)

ingen röd bil (no red car)

inget rött hus (no red house)

en annan röd bil (another red car)

ett annat rött hus (another red house)

vilket rött hus (which red house)

The plural has the suffix -a, and usually no article:

röda bilar

röda hus

röda män

röda tak

Pronouns take similar -a forms: några (some, any), inga (no), andra (others), vilka (which). The -a forms for pronouns are only used in the plural.

The -a-marker has a secondary role, though: adjectives in definite noun phrases. The North Germanic languages have definite article suffixes: bil-en - the car, hus-et - the house, hus-en - the houses, björnar-na - the bears. With some exceptions, one cannot just put an adjective before a definite noun - it requires a definite article to the left as well:

den nya, röda bilen (the new, red car)

det stora, vita huset (the big, white house)

de stora, vita husen

In German, noun phrases have an even more complex system than Swedish, with strong, weak and mixed adjectives behaving slightly different depending on whether the noun is preceded by one set, another set or no set of determiners. Case is also taken into account when selecting which suffix to use. Next up, we'll see the part of the grammar where Swedish is more complex than German.

The Swedish verb phrase congruence system

In German, adjectives with verbs like 'to be' and 'to become' are very easy: they just go in their most basic form.

Das Haus ist alt.
Der Mann ist alt.
Die Frau ist alt.
Die Männer sind alt.

Here, Swedish has a complication: the gender or number affects the adjective:

Huset är gammalt. (The house is old.)
Mannen är gammal. (The man is old.)
En kvinna är gammal. (A woman is old.)
Kvinnan är gammal. (The woman is old.)
Somliga män är gamla. (Some men are old.)
Männen är gamla. (The men are old.)

This holds regardless of the definiteness of the subject.

1. Congruence breaking with copulas

Common gender mass nouns, nouns denoting a material or abstract nouns in an indefinite, 'generic' type of reference often take neuter adjectives as complements of the copula, although this is not mandatory.  Examples:

Koppar är dyrt just nu.
Copper is expensive(neut) right now.
Ärter är gott.
Peas are tasty.

N.B. These examples are all taken from Svenska Akademiens Grammatik.

Koppar is a singular, common gender noun, so by the usual congruence rules, you'd get 'dyr'. Ärter is plural, so you would expect 'goda'. The aforementioned Svenska Akademiens Grammatik states that the likelihood of using neuter adjectives is lower the more of a 'description of function OR subjective evaluation' the statement is, and higher the more of a physical property it describes. 'Ärter är goda' does deviate from this, but again, this seems to be somewhat probabilistic statement.

Another use is when a noun can be replaced by a VP with 'have', 'give', 'get' or similar with the noun as the or object:

Kostym är snyggt.
Suit is good-looking
implicitly '(having a) suit (on) is good-looking.'

2. Congruence breaking within the NP

Previosuly, I described the distribution of three adjective forms: the unmarked, the -t and the -a form. There is a complication with the -a form: sometimes it can be replaced by the -e form, but this is almost entirely optional. The -e form normally can be used with masculine singulars. Ignoring that particular freedom is entirely possible for a competent speaker, and so there's no need to learn it. You could say 'den kompetenta läkaren' (the competent doctor) and get away with it. However, ... 'den kompetente läkaren' might signal a somewhat more conservative or educated register.

Crazy exception: a definite singular noun phrase with no noun, and a human referent. This corresponds to constructions such as 'the old one'. Regardless of gender, this must come out as 'den gamle'. There's an exception even there: when the noun is omitted by ellipsis in parallel constructions, -a is permissible - even for masculines. So, 'out of the sons, only the youngest one knew the answer', you can say 'av sönerna visste endast den yngsta/yngste svaret".

In addition, professional titles that are not explicitly feminine, and also human nouns ending in -are ('dansare', 'sångare', 'läkare' - dancer, singer, doctor), the -e form is sort of preferred when the gender is not specified. So even though -a i the gender neutral option, -e is preferred in gender-neutral contexts. ...

However! Crazy exception #2

Even when a gender-neutral title such as 'minister' or 'dancer' refers to a female, and is known by the speaker to do so, if the adjective "classifies" or "modifies the function", rather than "characterizes" the noun, -e is preferred. The examples are, again, from Svenska Akademiens Grammatik.

den nye/nya finske/finska utrikesminister-n Anna Lindblom
the new-masc finnish-masc foreign minister-(def) Anna Lindblom

den *trevlige/trevliga minister-n Anna Lindblom
the *kind-masc/kind-fem minister-(def) Anna Lindblom

den politiske/politiska fånge-n Violeta Jimenez
the political-masc/political-fem prisoner-(def) Violeta Jimenez
den svårt *sjuke/sjuka fånge-n Violeta Jimenez
the severely *sick-masc/sick-fem prisoner-(def) Violeta Jimenez

3. Definiteness discongruence

The adjective 'egen' (cognate to 'own') in educated speech is inflected according to the gender of the noun, and thus ignores definiteness. Normally, it does either occur with indefinite nouns or possessed nouns. With non-possessed definite nouns, it might actually prefer to use the definite -a form.

Remember, possessive pronouns trigger definite forms on the adjective (but not on the noun). (I lied a bit. Possessive pronouns trigger definite forms on the noun if they are right-dislocated: mitt hus (my house), but huset mitt (house-the my).

So, despite possessive pronouns usually forcing adjectives to take definite forms, these behave as follows, taking the indefinite, gender-marked forms instead:

mitt eget hus - my own house
din egen bil - your own car
våra egna vägar - our own roads/ways

You would very seldom come across

det egna huset

and the following form is downright wrong:

*det eget huset

But

ett eget hus / en egen bil

do occur, in contexts like 'I dream of a house of my own' - the 'my' would be superfluous in that context in Swedish. The adjective there is of course inflected as expected, as indefinite forms usually take the gender inflection on their adjectives.

However, the definiteness congruence is reinstated with right-dislocated possessive pronouns:

det egna huset mitt

Right-dislocated possessive pronouns are not exactly avoided in educated speech, but signal either dialectal background or a very conservative idiolect.

4. Orthographically quirky words

Since I do not hold the written language to be "the real language", I was a bit unsure whether this is real enough an example of discongruence to be included, but I decided to go for it anyway.

Two colours, orange and beige are unique among adjectives for having /ʃ/ (or if you're Swedish /ɕ/) written by <ge> in a word-final position. There are nouns (plantage, garage, dekolletage). It is generally held that writing beiʃa, beiʃe, beiʃt, oranʃa, oranʃe or oranʃt as <beigea, beigee, beigt or beiget, orangea, orangee, oranget or orangt> is unsatisfactory - it simply does not look very good.

In the spoken language this is not an issue, and the inflected forms are used, and are supposed to be used in correct Swedish. If one uses these adjectives in a position where they should have the -a/-e/-t forms, one is advised to write the uninflected form. When coming across them in writing, one is expected to read them in the correctly inflected form.

Personally, I decided - while writing this post - to solve this conundrum by writing the ʃ sound as -sj- in the inflected forms, but -ge- in the common gender uninflected form. (Thus orange, oransja, oransje, oransjt, beige, beisja, beisje, beisjt).

Writers are also suggested to use paraphrases like "orangefärgad/-färgat/-färgade" (= orange-coloured), or replace it with words like 'brandgul', 'apelsingul' or 'gulröd' (fire-yellow, orange*-yellow *=the fruit, yellow-red) whenever inflected.

5. Words that are morphologically indistinct (for all or some forms)

A few words lack distinct forms, including all present participles.

Ett rullande hjul (A rolling wheel)
En flygande pannkaka (A flying pancake)
Den sjungande barberaren (The singing barber)
Det brinnande huset (The burning house)

A pair of examples of their own type are the words "lätt" and "rätt" - easy, light (in weight) and "right": the neuter and common gender forms are identical, but the plural and definite form is 'lätta', "rätta".

'Different' - 'annorlunda' - is identical in all forms, and is thereby autological as far as morphological behavior goes. A few other adjectives fall in this class - 'enda' (only), 'noga' ('careful, scrupulous, meticulous'), 'barfota' (barefoot). A few other examples exist. One could potentially describe the adjectives that end in -a as having 'definiteness discongruence', but that feels like fudging it a bit too much.

6. Words with morphological gaps

A couple dozen adjectives ending in -t, -d or -dd, such as 'rädd' ('afraid') lack neuter forms - or neuter forms are at least strongly avoided by speakers. Plural forms are however permissible. Not all adjectives that end in -t, -d or -dd have this property though. The restriction only occurs with adjectives that semantically are restricted to animate nouns. However, some neuter nouns are animate.

These are distinct from category 4, on account of category 4 having all forms - tho' they are identical. These can only be used in slots where their available forms fit, whereas category 4 adjectives go in all slots, but morphologically conflate some slots.

7. Små vs Liten

This isn't really an example of discongruence, but tells us something about the congruence system in Swedish - essentially that the conflation of plural and definite is not complete, but only occurs on the surface.

This is also here to illustrate a non-semantic historic shift.

Liten has the following forms:

common: liten
neuter: litet
definite: lilla
definite masculine: lille

Notice a gap? Well, I've been somewhat remiss, in that I've not been consistent in providing the -a form with the label "plural and definite" consistently - this is exceptionally not available as an indefinite plural form!

The plural is små!

A full paradigm would actually be like this:

indefinite:

common: liten
neuter: litet (marginally also smått)
plural: små

definite:

common, neuter (, plural): lilla
solely plural: små

Thus, the plural congruence slot can take a form that common and neuter definite nouns cannot, thus illustrating that the conflation of the plural and the definite is somewhat superficial - there is at least this one lexeme that maintains a distinction between them.

Små- is also used as an element in compounds, regardless of number: småbarn (infants, lit. small-child), småsak ('a trifle', lit. small-thing), småsten ('small-stone'). To make the whole mess even greater, the comparative and superlative are formed from the root min- (mindre, minst), but there is also a parallel form 'smärre' that has some special connotations. (The superlative "smärst" is effectively extinct.) 

So, from the point of view of historical linguistics, English and Swedish share cognates 'little'/'liten' and 'small'/'små', but whereas English keeps both as perfectly nice synonyms with some minor differences in connotation and usage, Swedish has turned them into one single suppletive lexeme, where the suppletion is triggered by congruence-related concerns.

I am, however, under the impression that 'little' lacks entirely established comparatives and superlatives (littler, littlest being seen as either jocular or childish forms), and so the issue with smaller, smallest kind of serving as the comparative and superlative of both seems to say that English too has some level of conflation between the two words.

Detail #391: A Small Idea on Imperatives and Similar Moods

Thinking about the Dairwueh 'preprepositional' slot, that in some prepositions in that language can be used for certain things, I came up with an idea that I almost decided to incorporate in Dairwueh, but then realized it does have enough split ergativity already thank you very much. 

Ok, so. Consider a situation wherein a type of imperative - not perhaps the one you'd use when rude or in a hurry, so not the "get out of of the way of that speeding dogsled!"-kind of imperative, but rather a more relaxed or formal imperative.

This could basically reuse some preposition, which would mark the subject and object (thus opening for optatives and subjunctives and the like!) 

However, prepositions kind of prefer being prepositions. So, in the case of there being no object, the subject becomes the object of the preposition.

Here is the intransitive construction, rendered with 'for' as the imperative marker:

Sleep, for you! ('Sleep!')

Run, for him! ('Would that he run!')

Now, the transitive case is where it gets interesting:

Compose you.nom for a song! ('Write a song!')

Learn he for a job ('Would that he learned a job!')

Now, variants of the language could of course deal differently with it, placing, for instance, the intransitive subject to the left anyway, or adding a dummy pronoun to the object side, or even making this an OPS thing (Object, preposition, subject), or a PSO thing (preposition, subject, object).

This could of course generalize in other ways, and other prepositions might start taking two arguments. In fact, just generally, I am sort of fascinated with the idea of adpositions with multiple arguments recently.

Detail #390: If and Whether: Making a Tripartitie Division Instead

In English, the word "if" prototypically marks conditionals. However, it can also mark indirect questions as well as lack of knowledge about polar statements:

Do you know if he will arrive within the hour?
I don't know if he can make it.

This might be my non-nativeness that influences me, but it seems a positive statement about knowledge gets weird with 'if', and 'whether' would be preferrable:

?I do know if he can make it, but I won't tell you.
I do know whether he can make it, but I won't tell you.

Now, much as subordinating conjunctions like these offer up a rich vista of potential rules, what I really wanted to introduce here was a thing that certainly some language has done, and I bet it's not even all that unusual - but most readers are probably not aware of it.

Consider making a decision... whether to do something.

Decide if you want to sell it/whether you want to sell it.

This could quite naturally have its own conjunction - and naturally, these three could have some overlaps in certain syntactic and semantic contexts. 

Things that easily could affect their distribution are: verbal mood (especially conditional and imperative), negative, and potentially the verb of the matrix clause.

Further, one could of course have some subtle morphological variation on them depending on whether there's negatives involved, or whether the matrix clause has an imperative, etc.

Detail #389: A Differential Object Marking System with a Minor Twist

Let us posit a language with a malefactive and a benefactive case. The benefactive is used for indirect objects that receive benefits from the action, whereas the malefactive marks objects - both direct and indirect - that are detrimentally affected by the act.

Other direct objects are marked by the accusative.

As a side note: the numbering's been off for a while, due to some overlap at one part of hte indexing. I will correct them once I find the time.

Real Language Examples II: Germanic Reflexives and some Issues in Swedish

So, welcome back to this, the least didactically structured Swedish course ever, where we start out looking at the deep end of complex structures and never ever progress to anything basic like introducing yourself or saying that the house over there is red with white corners. And for convenience, some of this will be carried out using English vocabulary anyway so no need to worry.

No, I admit there will be a lot of Swedish here right now - when I've exhausted that particular ore deposit of interesting nuggets I'll go on to Finnish or some other language that happens to catch my fancy.

Let's get on with it. The preamble sets out the basic grammar that is of interest, and has indentation for clarity:

Swedish, unlike English, in first and second person usually doesn't use its cognate to 'self' in reflexives:
"I see me in the mirror" rather than "I see myself in the mirror" is the normal. "Själv" can be used to emphasize this, however. When used reflexively, själv (no points for guessing what that's cognate to) is not suffixed to the possessive forms, but is in apposition with the accusative forms.

So, with reflexives, the correspondences between subjects and objects is:

I: jag - mig (själv)
you_sg: du - dig (själv)

he: han - sig (själv)
she: hon - sig (själv)
it_c: den - sig (själv)
it_n: det - sig (själv(t))

we: vi - oss (själva)
you_pl: ni - er (själva)
they: de - sig (själva)

it_c is common gender, is it_n is neuter.
Analogously to swe: mig, eng: me, I will use se in some English sample sentences as a reflexive third person pronoun. See the parallel: mig:me::sig:se.




Han, hon, den, det (he, she, it_c, it_n) have accusative forms that are distinct from the reflexive forms:

han - honom
(but the accusative is 'han' in most dialects and several urban regiolects as well. Historically, 'han' was both the nominative and accusative, but the dative 'honom' replaced the accusative in the dialects the standard language is based on before datives vanished.)

hon - henne

den - den
det - det

Some verbs that can be used intransitively in English require reflexive marking in Swedish:

I wash up → I wash me

Some verbs change meaning when having a reflexive indirect object:

han tänker på X → he thinks of X
han tänker sig Y  ≃ he thinks se Y → he imagines Y

han ger något → he gives something
han ger sig  ≃  he gives se → he gives in, he concedes

det ter sig   ≃ it appears se → it appears (to be ....)

han ser → he sees
han ser sig om  ≃ he sees se about → he looks around

In these, the first and second persons would take the regular first and second person object forms instead, e.g. jag tänker mig, du ger dig, du ter dig, jag ser mig om, ...

Now, let's start working towards the tricky bits!

Coordination with 'and' generally leads to plural object pronouns, and you thus get

du och jag ser oss om ≃ you and I see us about ≃ we look around (us)
du och han ter er reformvänliga ≃ you<sg> and he appear you<pl, obj> reform-friendly ≃you<sg> and he seem to be reform-minded
hon och han ger sig ≃ he and she give se ≃ he and she give in

There's a person hierarchy: 1>2>3. If a 1st person pronoun is involved, the reflexive element is 1st person, and likewise, 2nd person beats 3rd.

However, what if there's a disjunction instead?

I or he has to give ...  se? us? me?

Different speakers seem to be of different opinion here, and some even avoid this kind of construction altogether. One can of course also take the things I discussed in the previous post (on than/än), and find even more complicated issues with these over comparisons:

?jag ger mig mer sällan än han
I give me (≃in) more seldom than he ?(gives se)

"Varken du eller han gav sig" - "Neither you or he gave se" - "Neither you or he gave in" seems to work for slightly more speakers.

In a language like Russian or Polish, where the reflexive pronoun is invariant for all persons, issues like these would not appear. But in those particular languages, the reflexive verbs generally use a reflexive suffix instead.

So, again, my hope with these posts is to highlights some parts of natural language where things get convoluted due to the very way the things are structured. I hope to inspire conlangers to come up with similar, well, "incomplete" and "awkward" parts for their grammars.

Real Language Examples I: Comparison

I have over the years read a lot of descriptions about linguistic structures. Seldom do conlangers ever even approach the level of intricacies that natural languages do, and there are of course natural reasons for this – a population of a million, or even just a few dozen will be exposed to more different real situations than a single conlanger will, and thus need to communicate more things.

Over decades or centuries, this may lead to established patterns that slowly shift around.


Anyways, looking at a few of these at some level of detail - and also discuss mistaken "models" for how they work - may be of interest. I figure I'd start out with two very similar words - Swedish än and English than.

This is not meant as me taking sides (although I think the side I am on with regards to prescriptivism will be clear), it is me showing just how convoluted grammar can be.

1. Etymology
Both of these words, funnily enough, are closely related to temporal adverbs - than originates as a spelling variant of then, än can still be used to signify still, although some speakers may prefer ännu for that.

2. Are they prepositions?
Some speakers (especially in the case of Swedish) object to the idea that they are prepositions, citing a supposed predicate that should be possible to insert. Thus 'A is bigger than B' really is 'A is bigger than B is (big)'. No speakers, as far as I know, deny that this construction can be used, though, and one can also compare things with different adjectives: 'A is longer than B is tall'. Similar objections sometimes are voiced in English, and thus you may have heard 'it should be "taller than I"'. And of course, case should follow concord in that case: "it made me taller than him", in case it made both of us grow taller. In this model, they are exclusively conjunctions.*

However ...

3. Are they subjunctions?
In both English and Swedish, they behave syntactically in ways that don't really fit subjunctions, but does line up with prepositions - and the pro-conjunction gang generally do not object to these behaviors, and sometimes even demand them. This requires some introduction.

3.1 English 'whom', but also preposition stranding
Some prescriptivist English authorities who otherwise prefer the subjunction model, demand 'than whom'. This despite it breaking their subjunction model. Also, the syntax of 'than whom' is decidedly unsubjunctionlike! Consider if "I am bigger than you" is really short for "I am bigger than you are", then "Than whom are you older" should be long for "Than whom is are you older". This seems to be a badly formed sentence even with the nominative who: "Than who is are you older" is just as bad English as the parallel construction is bad Swedish.

It gets even weirder to pretend the subjunctive model has any relevance when you hit it with stranding: "who are you older than (*is/?he is)?". And relative clauses would have a relative pronoun referring to a noun outside of the scope of a subclause!

The man than who(m) I am taller -> the man than who is (tall) whom I am taller  ... but "who(m)" refers to "man", which is not even in the same scope - "who" should now be inside the scope of "than". This is like having something like 'the man said that who came here yesterday he is sick' where 'who' in 'who came here yesterday' refers to 'the man'.

There are also other transformations that usually can hit prepositions, but can't hit subclauses that than can take. (This also holds for Swedish.) Swedish even more agressively strands prepositions than English does, and 'than' definitely can be hit by preposition stranding for most speakers of Swedish. No subjunction stranding exists. Also, subclauses have more restrictions on them during clefting than do prepositions, and 'än' seems to be able to fill both of those roles for most speakers.

3.2 Swedish reflexive possessive pronouns

A relevant piece of evidence in the case of Swedish is its reflexive possessive pronouns. Unlike western Germanic languages, the north Germanic languages kept a distinct reflexive possessive pronoun. This is used (mostly) when a third person subject is the possessor of some other noun in the clause. I will use the invented pronoun sy and syne for these in examples:

Mannen_i kör sin_i bil
The man_i is driving sy_i car
Mannen_i kör hans_j bil
The man_i is driving his_j car

Jag fann mitt paket och han_i fann sitt_i
I found my package and he_i found syne_i

So, this gets relevant due to a few reasons. All Swedish-speakers have these in their vocabulary, but in southern Sweden, due to the Danish influence/substrate/superstrate(!?) many speakers will use the regular third person pronouns anyway. Immigrants also tend to do so, or in the case of Slavic immigrants use them in all persons. So, correct use of these has become a shibboleth. Native speakers of northern varieties usually have no problems.

However, edge cases exist, and comparison is one of them. So, two observations: än, by one of the models introduces a subclause. For nearly all  speakers, sin cannot ever be the attribute of a subject.

However, speakers who long back to the day when everyone spoke proper Swedish and knew when to use the reflexives right tend to get infuriated whenever anyone says 'than his X' rather than 'than sy X'. Even when 'sy X' is the subject. And you ask them whether they can accept 'than sy X is' and they say no, and wonder why you even ask something silly like that**, and they often fail to grasp that they're being inconsistent.

So... the same person often will demand that when comparing subjects, subject forms be used, but when comparing with reflexive possessors involved, the only way of getting a permissible subject in there is strictly forbidden.

3.3 What is the expected verb phrase?
The idea that than/än always serve to introduce subclauses further runs into problems with things like this little 'story': Alice is short, but Bob is tall. Alice concocts a potion that makes her taller than Bob. Is Alice now supposed to say

"this potion made me taller than him"

or

"this potion made me taller than he"?

In the subclause model presented by Svenska Akademiens Grammatik, the actual subclause model copies the entire main clause into the subclause, substituting only whichever constituent(s?) is provided after 'än'. Thus, we are left with two optional interpretations:

'this potion made me taller than it made him'

or

'this potion made me taller than he made me'

In fact, Svenska Akademiens Grammatik only permits for using the nominative on the comparand after 'än' if the compared noun in the main clause is the subject. However, teachers who never learned how this is supposed to work think the implicit verb is 'är' or 'gör' (is or does), and so think "proper grammar" prescribes 'he' and thus 'taller than he (is)', which by the rules in SAG clearly is not the case.

3.4 Swedish reflexive Verbs

Some verbs in Swedish are innately reflexive, or require reflexive marking when English would not: "I am washing up" would come out as 'I wash myself'. NB: in Swedish, reflexives do not require the suffix själv (cognate of self), but can take it. Reflexive pronouns are not formed using genitives, but accusatives, so essentially "me(self)", not myself.

So, which one are we to pick:

I wash me more often than he?
I wash me more often than him?

Both should, according to SAG, lead to weird meanings:

I wash me more often than he (washes me)
I wash me more often than (I wash) him

When asking a group of grammar nazis***, ** only a few out of about thirty responses even spotted the problem. Most called for 'he', rather than 'him', due to 'I wash me more often than he does'. This doesn't even, imho, really justify or specify anything. Than he does what? Wash me?

The standard reference work for Swedish grammar states about elliptical clauses with 'än' that they need to copy the entire main clause except the one constituent that follows 'än', be that the verb, subject, object, some adverbial or some prepositional argument. Thus ... Svenska Akademiens Grammatik demands the interpretation I gave above. With regards to reflexives, it does not state (in that chapter) whether copying the main clause also adjusts reflexives, but other chapters that deal with coordination and with reflexives imply that one cannot assume reflexives to remain reflexives over coordination except in the case of the explicitly reflexive 'sig' on both arguments, i.e. when there's only third persons involved.

In the group I asked, no one came up with any other solution than using the full verb phrase, or solutions that their own rules preclude. A few "liberals" that - much like me - accept än as a preposition also accepted 'than me' as the trivial solution, and that is a solution I can accept.

Now, I did provide my own conservative solution, that was accepted by most:

än han sig
than he himself

 I realize this also does violate some of the nitty-gritty of the Svenska Akademiens Grammatik's description of how subjunction-like elliptical än works. However, I am not entirely sure this is a subjunction!

I imagine this could be considered a rare example of a preposition that takes both a subject and an object, rather than a subjunction with ellipsis!

The fact that no one else came up with this idea seems to suggest to me that the subjunction-with-ellipse model is not genuinely present in people's mental grammar, and if it were, they'd faster have realized the problem with the reflexive verbs.

3.5 Impossible Verbs
In some constructions, there are no reasonable subclause to posit after than/än:

"Fewer than two people know this"
"No one other than you knew of it"

The main clause's verb phrase is 'know this'. What is the supposed subclause 'than' would introduce? 'Know this'?!?

*fewer than three people know this know this.
*No one other than you knew of it knew of it
*no one else than I/me was there

'Do'? 'Are?'

*fewer than three people are know this.
*no one other than you are knew of it
*no one else than I was (there) was there

I am aware some English speakers might prefer 'but' for some of these, but even there the question about potential subclause remains, as some speakers would prefer 'but I/he' over "but me/him". In Swedish, 'än' is probably predominant here, as 'utom' (but) requires some rephrasing, and even then doesn't really permit any actual subclause in these cases.
Superficially, 'do' might look okay, but if we switch to a different verb phrase, e.g. 'are running', we immediately find out what the issue is. The 'other than'-example is also immediately exposed due to a tense mismatch:

*fewer [than three people do] know this
*fewer than three people do are running
*no one other than you did knew of it
*no one else [than I did] was there

Swedish provides similar examples with 'more than' (fler/mer än), fewer than (färre än/mindre än), 'other than' (annan/annat/andra än)

Weirdly, even though I find no way of turning these nouns into subjects of VPs, I prefer the nominative here when using pronouns, as do most conservative speakers of Swedish.

4 Conclusion

I am not a big fan of prescriptivism****. However, in this case they've created some interesting issues!

• They have provided inconsistent rulesets that are impossible for speakers to navigate. The only way to win is not to play.
• They exist at tension with the usage in large parts of the speaker community.
• Some prescriptivist-bent members of the speaker community have not properly understood the rules crafted by the authorities in the prescriptivist camp, and thus use home-crafted, different versions that may be superficially similar. These think they adhere to the strict rules, but fail to do so and create even more confusion.
• 'Than'/'än' themselves by nature exist in a weird tension between the two word classes among almost all members of the speaker community.
• The tension between different speakers' different mental models, the inconsistent ruleset and the strong beliefs about how it should be creates a fascinating grammatical situation, where also beliefs about the justifications for different case forms or different constructions are not consistently interpreted.

I would be very happy to see even a single conlang contain a single type of construction or a single word with a similar depth of complexity to it.



* Swedish grammar traditionally cuts conjunctions in two: conjunctions and subjunctions, where subjunctions subordinate one of the sides, i.e. almost always particles that introduce subclauses.


** I've done my research on this in a Swedish "grammar police group" on facebook.

*** The Swedish term is less offensive.

**** Although I generally am mostly in favour of a descriptive approach to language, but also of maintaining a literary standard (that does not force itself into people's daily conversations or light writing and light reading too hard), this might seem as though I am criticizing the conservative prescriptive language authorities very strongly - often, their advice is inconsistent, makes unjustified assumptions, and at least in bygone days even was phrased in a very unjustifiably elitist way (if someone is as inconsistent as prescriptivists often are, they do not deserve the right to lambast others for inconsistencies or failures to spot patterns or whatever).