Pseudo-Numbers in Tarist

In Tarist, numbers and certain determiners form a closed class. Unlike in some languages, these differ significantly from adjectives.

The word order in the Tarist noun phrase is very much like in English, except adpositional attributes precede the head in adjectivified forms, subclauses often are replaced by participles, and adverbial attributes do not as such exist - adjectives are formed from adverbials instead. Unlike English, adpositional phrases can be either pre- or postpositional – this depends on the lexical properties of the adposition itself, as well as on syntactical factors - arguments are more likely to have prepositions than adjuncts are, for instance.

Given the above information, we can go on to this form:

[prep] [det] [numP] [adjP]* [noun] [relP]

Out of these, adjP is the only part that can follow a copula:

The X is adjP. It is an adjP X.

*The X are numP. They are numP X.
*The X is relP. They are X relP.

Normally, adjectives that are derived from adverbials and prepositional phrases lose their derivation when being extracted. Numeral phrases behave slightly differently - the subject will be in a quirky case, and the ~copula will be 'have' instead.

Numerals, unlike adjectives, affect the case and number marking of their head nouns: inanimate nouns after a numeral are in the singular. If the numeral is in the nominative, ergative or absolutive, the noun will be in the ablative (if neuter), or the ergative plural (if animate). (The obvious exception to this are numbers whose value is one or a non-integer or zero. Ones always are followed by the singular of the same case, rationals and zero by the ablative singular.)

Now for the lexical quirk - some words whose meaning we would consider more adjective-like are syntactically numerals in Tarist. This leads to some peculiarities. Examples:

bari - young
tars - old
knaedze - big, huge
xvurn - valuable, important
sogor - dead
xkuna - whole
muras - strong
sitvi - small

A peculiarity with these is that they can be part of big numerals. They can be inserted anywhere in a numeral construction, giving numbers like 'onehundredwholeteen', 'strongthousandfiftythree', etc. These adjectives too affect the case marking and the number marking of their heads (although for animates, they permit singular and plural marking - with inanimates, there are workarounds using other quantifiers in coordinated constructions).

Subjects and Case in Tarist

(Tarist is probably not going to be very developed; to the extent it fits into my language ideas more generally, it's closely related to Bryatesle, but has been influenced by some language family I've yet to come up with).

In Tarist, there are two kinds of subjects - proper subjects and improper subjects. The main visible distinction between the two is their position in the clause: proper subjects precede the verb, improper subjects follow it. A few other differences exist:

• all first and second person pronouns are proper subjects regardless of their position
• no verb congruence is triggered by improper subjects
• improper subjects do not take quirky case, but are invariably nominative
• proper subjects can bind reflexive anaphora, improper subjects cannot, and bind third person anaphora for reflexive utterances (and are thus slightly ambiguous)
• proper subjects have a mildly ergative case marking going on (except pronouns, which are strictly nom-acc)
• improper subjects are seldom topics, proper subjects are almost always topics
• improper subjects cannot be gapped over coordinated verbs, i.e. you can't do VERB SUBJ₁ (OBJ) and ____₁ VERB (OBJ), but you can do SUBJ₁ VERB (OBJ and ____₁ VERB (OBJ)
• passives only take improper subjects

Some verbs do require specifically one type or the other, but such verbs are few. Most verbs permit both, and which one uses depends, mostly, on the information structure of one's utterance. However, many nouns also lack case forms - a fair share lack the ergative, a fair share also lack the dative or the ablative. For verbs that force proper subjects to be marked with those cases, nouns that lack the relevant case will instead appear as an improper subject.