Detail #82: Restricted imperatives

A language where imperatives cannot have adverbs of time, adverbs of location nor adverbs of manner. Not all verbs have proper imperatives, and the imperative is often slightly irregularly formed. A complement is generally mandatory (although a kind of empty dummy complement also exists). Other arguments are also rather limited - instruments can appear, but if so tend to be marked as objects instead, and seldom co-appear with direct objects. Indirect objects sometimes do appear with direct objects, but generally speaking either the direct or the indirect object tends to be understood.

More complex orders - anything involving a non-present time, non-present location or more complicated tools are expressed using various periphrastic means often involving irrealis moods or indirect statements.

Detail #10: Impermissible possession

Some languages have nouns that mandatorily have to be possessed. These often include body parts, family relations, and so on. How about nouns that cannot be marked as possessed using any nominal marking, but possessing them is possible by some uses of verbal voice, such as having the possessor be the causative subject, or the dative of a transitive verb, or even have the possessed subject demoted to object of an otherwise intransitive verb?

The language could even permit several of these periphrastic constructions and assign them to different registers or encode information about social status and deference in them.

Marking a permissibly possessed noun by any of these would be highly marked, and could indicate both disowning, distance or respect, depending on which construction is used.

I envision something along this table:

possessor <-> possessum
causative subject <-> the actor instigated to act on something (with transitive verbs that have been made causative)
subject of intr. verb <-> object of intr. verb (basically; there may be transitivizing morphology on the verb; still, the object is not properly or even syntactically an object in the language, as it should fail some syntactical as well as possibly other objecthood tests)
indirect object <-> subject (with both intransitive and transitive verbs)
oblique comitative* <-> causative subject
oblique comitative* <-> any non-subject

* in case the language has several different comitatives, the "most oblique" one, for some arbitrary measurement of obliqueness.