Dairwueh: Semi-genitive Adjectives

In Dairwueh, there is a set of adjectives whose congruence pattern is slightly off. Their behavior differs in one particular spot: for nominative nouns, their marking is masculine genitive. (The one exception is the word sabrin, "unusual, foreign, strange" which is in the feminine plural genitive with nominative nouns).

Not only do these behave slightly oddly within noun phrases (and fail to have comparative marking altogether), they also behave weirdly with copulas.

The main examples that are widespread through Dairwueh dialects include

koŋsat: last, final, complete
rəmgat: tired
lodat: correct, right, entitled
satpat: sturdy, firm
nestat: ancient
bartat: partial, incomplete, one among many, a few among many

Notice that the -at suffix in all of these is the genitive masculine morpheme, so the roots will consist of the adjective without that suffix.  Less widely distributed examples that are found in the capital area prestige dialect are

sxundat: wafer-thin
ropsat: bloody (from 'rapəs', blood, from *rrabx, bleed)
julkat: lazy
silgat: rank, rancid
xugat: brave
xsəlrat: avid, skilled, obsessed
tagrat: content
nalkat: sad
rusnat: smooth

With the copula, this type of adjective is marked by the preposition 'lo', when marking having that quality, and by the preposition 'əre' when marking acquiring that quality, and no congruence marking with regards to gender or number appears. The adjective then is in the masculine instrumental (-ŋa) with 'lo', and masculine accusative (-na) with 'əre'.

Detail #18: Weird things to do with adverbs

In some languages where adjectives are verb-like, let adjective-verbs form auxiliaries that mark all kinds of manner. Even permit numbers to form auxiliaries that mark "to do n times", or "to do the n:th time" or "to do to N objects" (in effect extracting the number from the object NP to the VP).

When many adverbs are called for, some may remain chained with the main verb, and if several are highly salient they can be coordinated with a shared complement VP along these lines:

John quicks and carelesses stack[infinitive] the books

John carelesses stack the books and quick

John carelesses stack the books quick

John stacks the books, carelesses and quicks

If the adverbial has little to do with the subject, they may take a dummy subject:

John's house burned down, [dummy] unfortunates. 

Maybe a causative would be nice there?

[dummy] unfortunate.causative.3sg John's house burned down.

Would maybe work best in a language where infinitives can mark subject agreement? Alternatively, a language where there is some but rather sparse verb morphology, e.g. something along the system in standard Swedish with an explicitly marked present tense distinct from the infinitive.

As for numbers, some pronouns could also work:

I many.1sg have ideas - I have many ideas, "I profusely have ideas"

You howmany.2sg run laps? - You ran how many laps?

They how.3pl.past? - How did they do it?

 On the other hand, if done badly - without making a really thought-through morphosyntax here, it would easily end up a silly way of marking things in the wrong place.

Detail #7: splitting the adjectives in two classes: "adjectives vs. adjectoids"

Many conlangers like reducing the number of word classes in their languages. One popular and relatively easy target of this reduction are the adjectives.

Let us do something else, let's increase the number of word classes, and let us do that by splitting the adjectives in two!

How would one go about doing something like that? First, let us make them behave differently morphosyntactically; have one of the classes mark congruence with the noun as far as case goes. Let us have the other category redundantly mark some kind of noun class system along the lines of the system of Chinese.

Let's call the two adjective kinds adjectives and adjectoids. The difference given above seems a bit small, let us come up with some other differences, both notional and syntactical.

A simple difference that could be relevant to the speakers of the language would be whether a word is understood as denoting that the noun has a quality, or denoting that the noun is a member of a class with a distinguishing trait.


Adjectives

• mark case and number
• productively can form verbs both or 'turning increasingly x' or 'make something x'
• use location-like metaphors (go (to) x, g from x, stand at x)
• have case-congruence even as verbal complements
• come closer to the head noun

Adjectoids

• mark noun class
• tend towards more periphrastic expressions
• use membership-like metaphors (join x,  be of x, be with x, x encompasses, x embraces) 
• have no congruence as verbal complements
• go further from the head noun

Adjectives have a closer syntactical affinity to verbs, adjectoids to nouns; still, both have (partly separate) morphology for forming nouns and verbs; verbs more easily form adjectoids, nouns more easily adjectives.

Both classes have some exceptional derived forms among nouns and verbs. Some adjectives have synonymous adjectoids, but far from all. Prepositional phrases easily form adjectives as well, whereas pure nouns easily form adjectoids. 

What word order this language otherwise would prefer depends a bit on what other syntactical features it has - I think something along the lines of det NOUN adjt. adjd.  would be neat.