Zompist Bboard Again

.... there's a difference between whether you can distinguish nouns and verbs in the dictionary and whether you can distinguish nouns and verbs in sentences. .... Thanks! That I understand. And I particularly enjoy the bear captain harbor example! Zero-derivation can make it very hard to say what c...

In my grammar for my conlang Arpien, the word-and-phrase-classes I call “parts-of-speech” are “distributional” classes. Words in the same class have the same “privileges of distribution” (iow can “go in the same places”); and if two words have the same privileges of distribution then they’re in the ...

Using Case-Endings and Postpositions and Prepositions to Mark Case-Like Stuff Imagine a language with a few case-endings and a few postpositions and a few prepositions. Imagine the following are true: * any noun-phrase can be used with no case-ending and no postposition and no preposition. * any no...

Didn’t there used to be a thread like this?
This thread is for people to post ideas about the grammar, or morphology, or syntax, or morphosyntax, of possible conlangs.
They may not have yet named or completed the conlang. Or they may not yet have decided which conlang to use the idea(s) in.

For a syntactician, they're different when different syntactic operations apply. Your description shows just that (the adjectives differ from verbs in that they can participate in resultatives and adverbialization). Parts of speech don't need to be binary— your adjectives are very verby. Or you cou...

The writer Jo Walton named what she called the Tiffany Problem: in the Middle Ages, there were women named Tiffany. (It comes from Theophania.) But if a fantasy novel or even a historical novel had a Tiffany, it would sound comic. I would go with naming her Theophania; and once she is adult having ...

In languages with case which are both Ergative-Absolutive and Secundative, does the role of a 'Donor' typically get marked in the Ergative case or do they typically show it some other way? Can you give us some examples of such languages? https://wals.info/combinations/105A_98A#2/-9.8/154.3 Secondar...

I’m not sure I really had to unlearn it, since I never assumed it was correct, but I used to silently-in-my-head “say” “You-be-QUITE-us” for “ubiquitous”, before I had ever heard it. Others: “kly-TOR-is” (you can probably guess why I hadn’t heard that one out loud), “chol-MON-de-Ley” instead of “CHU...

Googling nonconfigurational serial verb gets some hits, for example some involving an Australian language named Wambaya. It's an interesting case, because (from just glancing at the abstract to one paper) it's serial verbs aren't in iconic order, though it's supposed to be a very robust generalisat...

Does anyone know of any natlang(s) that have or had both free word-order and serial verb constructions? If so, what were these FWO SVC languages? And what strategies do or did they use to say which participant-nouns go with which verbs? Or do all real-life SVC natlangs use word-order a lot? ————— Re...