Duriac Thread

[vegfarandi]

Activity vs. State

Verbs in any language can be split along multiple semantic dimensions. But we often take for granted the splits that are prevalent in our native languages and those related to them. I've tried my best to achieve a very different set of semantic groupings from the languages I know best. In one of the first posts, I delineated a few key areas of difference:

• Verbs of motion and rest tend to encode manner but not direction (so there's run vs. crawl, but not ascend vs. descend)
• Verbs don't tend to encode what Dixon calls the "manip" (so there's just hit, no punch or slash)
• The semantic groups handled by adjectives in English are handled by verbs in Duriac (= adjectival verbs or va.)
• Attention verbs tend to be phrasal, using the relevant body part noun (see this post)
• Lastly, there are barely any secondary verbs.

I'd like to add a sixth item:

• The difference between activity and state is rarely expressed lexically.

Somehow I missed this the first time around, but that's really neat and well-thought out.

Thank you! As my conlanging career has gone on, I've started to become more and more interested in the semantic basis of grammar. I had already started to explore this with my previous work on Imutan which has an unusual case system that's more sensitive to thematic role (agent, patient, experiencer, theme etc.) than grammatical role (S, A, P, IO). But then I read Dixon's book, Semantic Approach to English Grammar and it blew my mind because it had been where my mind had already gone but it was the first time I'd see such an approach articulated. The problem with using it for conlanging is that it requires you to really work out the lexicon in a great amount of detail and this is a bit of a weak point of mine, because for the level of realism I'm aspiring to, it's difficult to achieve for a lexicon without building multiple languages, since realistically, languages will have a significant amount of borrowing. For Duriac in particular, what I struggle with is whether to allow borrowing from Earth languages, since the language is ostensibly set on Earth, or not. And it's all just slightly too much to work out/decide at the moment.