Detail #200: Conflated Participles and Culture

Imagine a language where you have your usual passive and active participles. However, for some verbs, these are morphologically conflated (due to sound change, semantic shift or whatever). Some of these conflations are given cultural significance, i.e. judges are called 'decided/deciding', and this is parsed as them having been decided for their role, as well as their role being that of deciding what is right. 

Some other participles might exist, and if the change that has led to conflation is not sound change-related but rather some odd semantic-grammatic change, you might have other conflations as well, and maybe those too are parsed as telling something significant about the action itself as well as those who the participle pertain to, e.g. maybe the active participle and the recipient participle of 'hunt' is the same, and therefore, hunting is understood as something that is done by the hunter for himself more than for the others that benefit from the game he catches. 

Maybe an instrumental participle and the passive participle of 'strike with a hammer' are conflated, and the fact that tools can be used to make tools is somehow seen as embedded in this.

Detail #199: An Ergative Subsystem in a Language with Absolute Directions

Let us consider a language that otherwise is fairly accusative in its alignment. Intransitive verbs of movement or transitive verbs that impart movement, however, have a somewhat ergative structure.

The absolutive is split up into a few subcases: each one correlating to one of the absolute directions (four or eight or whichever number the language has). The ergative is either the same as the nominative for transitive verbs or an instrumental or somesuch.

Thus, "I go north" is "I-abs-north go", "I hunted it northwards" is "I.erg hunted it-abs-north".

The directional cases are also used with verbs of location; however, with first and second person, and sometimes third person in proximity to the first person, this is omitted. However, if the speaker and listener are exceptionally far in some direction, the directional cases may be used with intransitive verbs (as well as when first or second person is the object of a verb of movement, that sets out to explain how come the person is exceptionally far from his usual geographical range.)

Detail #198: Some Uses for a Case Restricted to Certain Possessums

Consider the following statement:

I have a book

 We could consider having a special case that appears in this, giving us instead a clause of the structure

I am book-POS

Translating this into English as 'I am book-having' could make sense, to some extent. In fact, English almost permits this with a few particular nouns:

she is armed
he is tender-hearted
they are all peg-legged
etc

In English, suffixing -having, or using the past participle(!) of a noun tends to either parse as indefinite or somewhat inalienable possession. In the language we're now creating, we ignore definiteness. We might even exclude -POS from being used with inalienable possession altogether.

However, having a case that is specifically restricted to forming ways of saying 'have' might seem a tad wasteful, so let's extend its use a bit. We might use it whenever possession is changed in some way or other.

I gave you-ACC?/DAT? house-POS

The possession of the house has changed, and thus we mark the house with -POS. If the possession per se doesn't change, we use the accusative instead:

I gave you-DAT key-POS

In this circumstance, the case on the object distinguishes "lend" from "give", or "borrow" from "take". This case could of course also be used with specific verbs like 'marry' (maybe the subjects both are marked by -POS?), and maybe that's the one exception where the -POS case can go on subjects? Maybe subjects can be in the -POS case under a number of circumstances?

Detail #196: Pronouns pertaining to Contrary Interests

Consider situations where people together do something, all in order to safeguard their own interest – in opposition to each others' interests. Although it seems unlikely that nouns would have such forms - except maybe a few specific nouns - plural pronouns could imaginably have forms for this, especially subject forms. 'We negotiated a truce' could then have two different meanings depending on which form is used:

we_regular negotiated a truce → we had negotiations with them that concluded with them and us reaching a truce
we_contrary negotiated a truce → we_{1 and 2} negotiated a truce between us_{1 and 2}

This could extend to more collaborative verbs as well:

we_regular got married → both of us found spouses whom we married
we_contrary got married → we married each other

Basically the name of the pronoun type could be something like 'preemptively reflexive/reciprocal pronoun' or something. However, since the type of reflexivity/reciprocality is not specified – i.e. there's no, for lack of a better, more specific term, pseudo-resumptive pronoun to tell us the actual role that the subjects take with regards to one another – this creates some nice ambiguity while also dissolving some ambiguity.

Detail #195: Contrastive Pronouns for Enumeration

Consider a fishmonger asking a customer which fish the customer wants:

"this one? or this one? how about this one?"

There could easily develop a slightly productive way of marking listed pronouns:

this, or this, this then, even this, ... → this, oris, thsen, evnis

The same morphemes could affect personal pronouns when ordering several different people, for instance:

you do this, oryou do this, youn do this, evnyou do this

Same goes with third persons. With first person pronouns, however, it can be used to mark sequences of events:

I went to town, ori found a sweet girl, Ithn bought her a drink, evni never heard of her again

After 'evn-', that form is repeated (or maybe the sequence restarts at or-). Derive the pronouns from adverbs, conjunctions and pronouns in your own language, of course. One possible source could also be intensifiers and comparatives, even superlatives.

Detail #194B: Contrastive Dummy

A dummy pronoun with the contrastive case mentioned in the previous post could be a pretty intriguing thing: instead of saying "but X verbs" you'd have "X verbs dummy.CONTR". Which particular syntactic position - subject, object, indirect object, more general adverb - that the dummy takes depends on the argument structure of the verb itself.

Detail #194: Contrastive Marking

Let's consider differential object marking (DOM) along the Baltic Finnic type, i.e. one of the cases is universally used with negative verbs, and also quite often with affirmative verbs - basically, the other possible case marks a combination of things, of which affirmativeness only is one. Now, imagine constructions with contrastive gapping:

I don't eat pork but venison

Let's further assume that the DOM over time is weakened, and the more general case - the one used both with negatives and many affirmatives - turns into a more general accusative. The other case remains, but is used for whatever usages there might be.

However, we return to the form above: the case might have been used to contrast the two objects even when not enough of the usual requirements were fulfilled. So, one usage that gets tied up with it is contrast.

I don't eat pork.ACC venison.CONTR

This might extent to other roles: contrasting with subjects, locations, etc. Contrast might go even beyond negative-affirmative:

I solve problems.ACC and also cause them.CONTR

even beyond that, you can get subjects:

I solve problems.ACC and he.CONTR creates them.ACC

in both of these examples, 'and' could be more idiomatically translated into English as 'but'. However, in the language we're dealing with, 'and' might not even necessarily be marked. In a way, CONTR marks the central argument of a coordinated, contrasting VP.

It might even develop further, to get things like:

I got 99 problems.ACC a bitch.CONTR

 where the first construction we saw also has an affirmative structure - i.e. we're not just contrasting verb phrases with each other, or a negative verb phrase with a contrasting object coordination, we're also doing the same for affirmative verbs.