Michael Reddy's original 1979 article The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language deals specifically with the conceptual metaphor around metalanguage in English. Does the same metaphor apply in other languages? If it's not universal, what other cognitive metaphors are attested for metalanguage?
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Demonstratives: A cross-linguistic typology (Dixon)
This week's paper was again submitted by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate and presents a cross-linguistic typology of demonstratives. It primarily distinguishes three main types of demonstratives: nominal, local adverbial and verbal. It then surveys their basic properties: forms, functions and types of reference. More on that can be found if you click on the link above. Dixon defines a demonstrative as "a grammatical word (or, occasionally, a clitic or affix) which can have pointing (or deictic) reference;" Now, let's move unto the prompts:
- What are the morphosyntactic properties of demonstratives in your language, if they exist at all?
- How are the three main types proposed by the paper included, if at all?
- Is there any syncretism or polysemy with regards to the forms of demonstratives?
- Do the demonstratives in your language exhibit any characteristics that are not included in the prototypical definition of demonstratives?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Are there any other cross-lists besides CMSC25610 = LING28610? Would need just two more besides that one to make my major plan work without overloading credits.
CMSC25610 is undergrad computational ling. (definitely double counts)
CMSC25700 is natural language processing (for some reason, not cross-listed on the website, despite having a lot to do with linguistics, could I petition for this somehow?
CMSC21010 is mathematical foundations (cross lists with LING21010, but that course does not show up on the Linguistics major courses page)
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Pluractionality: A cross-linguistic perspective (Mattiola)
This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/PyrolatrousCoagulate and presents a cross-linguistic perspective of pluractionality. Mattiola defines pluractionality as being a "morphological modification of the verb or a pair of semantically related verbs that primarily convey a plurality of situations involving a repetition in time, space, and/or participants (Mattiola, 2019, p. 164)." Moreover, the paper distinguishes pluractionality as a subtype of verbal number; the latter may be encoded through any linguistic means (e.g., adverbs), whereas pluractionality refers to the encoding of these semantics by direct morphological modification on the verb. An alternative definition can be found on Wikipedia: "[it] is a grammatical device that indicates that the action or participants of a verb is/are plural." Now onto the prompts:
- Are verbs marked for pluractionality in your language?
- If not, what are other means to express verbal number?
- What other functions do these markers encode β besides pluractionality? (e.g., habituality, continuativity)
- How do pluractional markers behave morphosyntactically?
- Are there any interesting interactions between pluractional markers and other morphemes?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Nominal Tense in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Nordlinger & Sadler)
This week's paper provides a cross-linguistic view on the topic of nominal tense. While tense is traditionally considered a verbal category, it may also appear on nominals in some languages. Phrases like 'my former' in 'my former house' can be expressed by a single affix in these languages. Some even mark other non-tense categories, like mood and evidentiality on nouns (e.g. Nambiquara waΒ³linΒ³-suΒ³-nΒ³tiΒ² 'this manioc root that both you and I saw recently'). Now let's move onto the prompts:
- Does your language feature nominal tense?
- Which tenses can nominals be marked for?
- How does it interact with possession?
- How does it interact with definiteness and articles, if there are any?
- Can nominal tense morphemes be stacked? What semantics does such a stacking yield?
- If your language does not feature nominal tense, is there any special way in which your language expresses such contexts?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
The cross-linguistic patterns of phonation types (Esposito & Khan)
This week's paper was submitted by u/MerlinMusic and describes the cross-linguistic patterns that appear with respect to phonation types. Phonation, also known as voice quality, describes the production of sounds by the vocal folds. There are several categories on the phonation spectrum, all of which can be included in your language. The paper already provides a good overview, but if you want another resource, you can check out the Wikipedia page on phonation here. Now let me present this week's prompts:
- What voice quality contrasts are there in your language, if any?
- Are only consonants, only vowels, or both affected?
- How do other features (e.g. duration) interact with phonation?
- If your language is tonal, does phonation interact with the tone-bearing unit?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/o9kajt/deciphering_the_indus_valley_script_seems_like_an/
The decipherment of the Indus Valley Script is ongoing and I wanted to put this together to show the Dravidian hypothesis as an in-depth OP because it was so fascinating. Unfortunately r/History does not support images which are required because the Indus Valley Script doesn't have unicode support yet and cross-posts don't work here either so I tried it this way by linking it to my post on r/linguistics where my post was recieved well. I hope that my post was informative and have a nice day! If this isn't allowed here please inform me.
Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
A cross-linguistic study of case and switch-reference in unrelated languages (Nonato & Souza)
This week's paper was submitted by u/Slorany and talks about switch-reference and case in unrelated languages. Switch-reference refers to the case in which a multiverbal construction is marked for having co-referential (same-subject marking) or distinct subjects (different-subjects). If you want to learn more about switch-reference, check out the wikipedia page on it (There are some papers about the topic linked on the bottom of it.) Now let's move onto the prompts:
-
Does your language exhibit switch-reference?
- If so, how does it work, both morphologically and syntactically? Are conjunctions inherently same-subject or different-subject? Or are there morphemes that mark these categories?
- If not, how would you construct sentences where the two subjects are co-referential or distinct?
-
What morphosyntactic alignment does your language exhibit?
- What role does case play in your conlang? Is your language's morphosyntactic alignment encoded by case, or by something else?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!
(I also posted this in a similar sub-reddit, here)
Hi,
I am not a particularly advanced learner of Turkish, but I am interested in learning about the more academic study of Turkish and Turkic languages in general. I would like to understand more about the Turkic peoples' history (or histories) through learning about their languages. I am interested most specifically in learning about the Oghuz branch (particularly Eastern Anatolian and the Azeri dialects), and also the Uyghur language(s)/dialect(s). I'm also interested in learning about Turkish linguistics in general.
Does anyone have any advice as to where I could start, or if I even should start now, before developing my (Δ°stanbullu) Turkish more?
I was thinking about the two zero-derived verbs to boat and to ship yesterday, and how they, despite being derived from very similar nouns, have several different grammatical and semantic characteristics: the former is generally intransitive and the latter is almost always transitive, the former is less deliberate / intentional and the latter is more so, and the latter has a semantic extension ("to send out for business", even by land or air) that the former doesn't. That all made me wonder, is there any consistent semantic content to zero-derivations at all, or could - if we knew nothing about English or English-speaking cultures - "to boat" have any verbal meaning that might be associated with boats? It seems very weird to imagine it meaning "to get in a boat" or similar, but I can't think of any particular reason why.
Pulmonic consonants only. Other sound categories like implosives and clicks would serve to complicate this further
ββ¦ well, what does it sound like?β
This is for a conlang I'm working on
Do verbs tend to end in vowels, or consonants, across languages? How about nouns and modifiers?
I remember hearing something about a trend to this effect, but I forget the details, and I can't find any papers on it. Any links would be much appreciated!
Are early languages basically the result of onomatopoeias and mimicking gestures increasingly being converted into less mimicking related sounds and increasing complexity for the purposes of precision, more efficient throat and mouth movements or similar?
Curious about this phenomenon in English, and wondering if it is present in other languages, and maybe about the nature of this phenomenon.
edited to add definition:
"Cross-linguistic transfer is defined as language learners' use of linguistic knowledge of one of their languages to leverage the learning of another language. Theories on cross-linguistic transfer shed light upon the role of L1 in promoting L2 or foreign language learning" (Yang et al., 2017).
also congrats on 69.6k conlangers, soon we'll reach 69,696
Edit: an onomatopoeia /ΛΙnΙ(Κ)matΙΛpiΛΙ/ is defined as the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named (e.g. cuckoo, sizzle ).
Onomatopoeia is interesting in every language but Japanese is especially great - there are so many of them and itβs amazing how easily you can use them in a sentence. Also, is there an onomatopoeia for something like βchillβ or βcomfyβ? I would appreciate any help :>
