Detail #444: Doubly Marked Comparison

One way of stucturing particle-based comparisons that I have not seen is one of using two particles, one for each comparand. Let's notate these as C_g and C_l, for comparand_greater and comparand_lesser. In the most basic expression, you maybe coordinate them with an 'and':

C_g John and C_l Eric is fast(er)

John is faster than Eric

-(er) might be superfluous, but what if there are several other things that could be the compared quality, e.g.

C_g John and C_l Eric sail heavy boats often.

Does John sail heavier boats often, or does he sail heavy boats more often? So, for now, I'm going to keep the -er morpheme here.

What benefits does such a system bring? It signals that a comparison is coming very early. It also permits for some ... oddities.

C_l Eric.nom counted C_g the sheep.acc.

 Eric counted fewer than the sheep. (Eric didn't count all the sheep)

One could also imagine situations where the particles are off in different main clauses, and maybe even mark non-NPs?:

John hits C_l hard and Eric can C_g take.
Eric can take harder hits than John dishes out.

 This is not meant to be a full description of a system, but just some thoughts on how to restructure comparison and maybe innovate a slight bit, as well as the possible concerns one might look at.

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.