Tag Archives: Ayeri

Some Further Thoughts on Agreement in Ayeri

Grammar Musings, , , ,

Ayeri makes use of grammatical gender to at least some degree. As a category, gender is by far not as pervasive as in Romance languages, though, since in Ayeri it only matters in picking the correct case suffix for agents and patients (animate vs. inanimate) as well as in 3rd person pronouns and verb agreement (masculine/feminine/neuter animate vs. inanimate). The fact that gender plays a role in verb agreement opens up possibilities for adding some quirks. As pointed out in a previous blog article,

Ayeri usually exhibits verbs as agreeing with agents and occasionally patients, not topics as such. This may be a little counterintuitive since the relation between topics and subjects is close, but is possibly due to the fact that the unmarked word order is VAP. This means that agent NPs usually follow the verb, and it strikes me as not too unnatural to have an agreement relation between the verb and the closest NP also when non-conjoined NPs are involved (Corbett [2006:] 180). This conveniently explains why verbs can agree with patients as well if the agent NP is absent.

This brings up the idea that Ayeri should likely exhibit agreement with the closest conjunct when a word is forced to agree with coordinated NPs of different genders, instead of finding some way to resolve conflicting gender features. Yet, however, I have often been following the rule that a masculine entity and a feminine entity, regardless of number, resolve to masculine as the default gender, though sometimes I have also used the neuter as a third category to escape to (Wechsler 2009 actually quotes Icelandic as following this route):

M + F = M (N attested)
F + M = M (N attested)

I was originally wondering if I should get rid of this system and instead use nearest-conjunct agreement throughout, but—why not have both? In this little blog article I basically want to sketch out an idea I had in the hope that it is well within the confines of what natural languages do. Note that the tables given in the following refer strictly to verb agreement, where the verb precedes any NPs it agrees with. Thus, for the outcome of nearest-conjunct agreement, it is assumed that the agreement target precedes the agreement controller, so that the verb should in most cases agree with the first conjunct.

Now, if NPs referring to people or other entities to which masculine and feminine apply as grammatical categories have their diverging gender features resolved to masculine as the default, what about combining either masculine or feminine with neuter? This is shown in the following table:

M + N = M
N + M = N
F + N = M (F possible)
N + F = N

From this table we can gather that in general, there is nearest-conjunct agreement for combinations of masculine/feminine and neuter, though feminine and neuter equally resolve to masculine as the default if the feminine conjunct is closer to the agreement target. Note that for agreement with simplex NPs, there is no default gender, so masculine gender will trigger masculine agreement, feminine gender will trigger feminine agreement, etc. As indicated in the table above, true nearest-conjunct agreement with the feminine conjunct is possible as well, however, basically ignoring any further complications. It takes not a lot of imagination to assume that the regularization towards nearest-conjunct agreement would be a point of divergence between the formal and the colloquial language and also very likely a fertile ground for prescriptivist bickering.

So far, we have only looked at the combinations within the animate tier. The following table lists the possible permutations for combinations of animate and inanimate NPs:

M + INAN = M
INAN + M = INAN
F + INAN = M (F possible)
INAN + F = INAN
N + INAN = N
INAN + N = INAN

For consistency, the same rules as above operate here: masculine and feminine mixed with inanimate show nearest-conjunct agreement. If, however, a feminine conjunct comes first, agreement will default to masculine, though again, nearest-conjunct agreement to feminine is possible.

Wechsler (2009: 571–73) furthermore discusses Corbett (1991)’s observation that there may be differences in how languages go about gender resolution with regards to semantic and syntactic resolution—i.e. resolution of conflicts in gender between the semantics and the form of a word—and finds that animacy plays a role in that. This is relevant in cases where grammatical and semantic gender diverge, as in hybrid nouns like German Mädchen ‘girl’. Mädchen semantically refers to a female person but by its form is of neuter gender, since the diminutive suffix -chen always derives neuter nouns. The question now is, which gender do pronouns and agreement referring to the girl have, neuter or feminine? In fact, variation can be observed in these cases.

While Ayeri assigns masculine and feminine semantically (with neuter for the remainder of animate entities which are neither male nor female), there are occasional idiosyncrasies with nouns very obviously referring to non-living things being assigned animate neuter gender, such as nanga ‘house’. It might be interesting to develop some further ideas for likely outcomes in that regard even though canonically, nearest-conjunct agreement should operate in those cases and conlangs, by their nature, probably produce a lot less variation than actual natural languages do.

  • Corbett, Greville G. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.
  • ———. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.
  • Wechsler, Steven. “‘Elsewhere’ in Gender Resolution.” The Nature of the Word: Studies in Honor of Paul Kiparsky. Ed. by Kristin Hanson and Sharon Inkelas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Print. 567–586. Current Studies in Linguistics.
  • I can’t seem to keep my terminology straight: I corrected *nearest-conjunct resolution to nearest-conjunct agreement in a few places.

Update on the Grammar Writing Process II

Grammar Musings, Soapbox, , , , ,

A problem I have recently come to see with conlanging is that while a whole number of people may research a natural language at any time, each researcher contributing to scholarly discourse from their area of expertise, your typical conlanger is working on their fictional language all by themselves. I’m no exception with regards to this. This also means, however, that only you are acquainted with your conlang, which also means that while fleshing it out, you have to be a kind of jack-of-all-trades if you want to do it well. On the other hand, a single person does not have talent for or interest in all areas of a field to the same degree, nor can you know everything about a field as variegated as linguistics. In addition to this, acquiring some deeper knowledge and experience just in a part of a field takes time.

While writing my new Ayeri grammar, describing phonology at least roughly, and morphology with a little more attention to detail seemed fair enough.[1. I will still have to rewrite some things with regards to cliticization, though. For instance, I am not quite sure whether manga with verbs is inflection or rather a special clitic; the term ‘bound word’ from Zwicky (1977) I used in the grammar hasn’t stood the test of time. I’m currently reading up on more recent research and positions on clitics in Spencer & Luís (2012), so corrections to the morphology chapter will follow eventually.] Describing a language, however, doesn’t end at elaborating on how to form words. Syntax is just as important, as it describes how to form larger units of meaning, which is certainly no trivial issue either. Since Ayeri’s structure departs from English in some basic ways, it definitely warrants more serious attention.

Most conlangers I know seem to be mainly interested in morphology, and may even go so far as meeting formal syntax theories with suspicion. Moreover, I have never had a proper introduction to syntax myself either, for instance, in class at university. However, since Ayeri is rather different from German or English, I have long had an itch to figure its syntax out in a more structured way, in order to find out and describe in standard terms what I have been doing so far without giving it too much of a second thought. Since I’ve been trying to keep up a certain level of seriousness in the grammar, simply stating that Ayeri is VSO and heads mostly go first, and treating everything within 5 pages won’t do. Dealing with such a complex topic this superficially does not seem satisfying to my own curiosity and ambition. I am hoping that finding out more about Ayeri’s syntax will uncover more remaining blank spots, the filling of which would allow me to add yet more depth.

A colleague of mine had suggested to get acquainted with Lexical-Functional Grammar, actually with regards to my day job as a grad assistant. Describing Ayeri in this framework, however, might be interesting as well, since LFG was developed with flexibility in mind so that configurational, non-configurational, and mixed languages can all be dealt with in a straightforward manner. With its VSO constituent order, Ayeri may fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, though this needs further analysis, which I can’t provide just yet. I have been trying to work through Bresnan et al. (2016), but I realized that trying to study these things on my own is no adequate replacement for correction by teachers, since it’s too easy to accidentally gloss over important details by reading a textbook without discussing its contents. Furthermore, this book presupposes familiarity with common structuralist paradigms, such as Generative Grammar (Carnie 2002/2013 seems to be a popular introduction), Government and Binding, and X-bar theory, which it seems reasonable to acquaint myself with before I continue.

Yet, I am impatient to keep on writing, since I really don’t want to let the grammar drift off into negligence again this time. I had written some 20 pages on syntax earlier this month, however, I realized that much of what I had written is probably wrong, since, for example, I disregarded lexical integrity as a fundamental principle with regards to what I assume to be clitics, simply for the reason of not being aware of this principle for the lack of formal training in a very formal discipline. For the time being, I have deleted what I wrote about the phrase structures of DPs/NPs and AdjP/AdvPs from the PDF in the main development branch on Github (‘master’) to not spread misinformation. Once I know more and have reevaluated some things, development on this part will go on in the ‘trunk’ branch, which I will merge back into ‘master’ once I am confident enough that my analyses are at least not completely off.

Thus, for the time being, the grammar will have to pause at morphology, and hopefully not for another 5 years. Alternatively, I may need to find a way to adequatly describe how to form clauses and sentences without getting too deeply into theories, at least provisionally, if that is possible.

  • Bresnan, Joan et al. Lexical-Functional Syntax. 2nd ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Print. Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics 16.
  • Carnie, Andrew. Syntax. A Generative Introduction. 3rd ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Introducing Linguistics 4.
  • Spencer, Andrew and Ana R. Luís. Clitics. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.
  • Zwicky, Arnold M. On Clitics. 1977. Arnold M. Zwicky. 21 Apr. 2015. Stanford U. 21 Apr. 2015. Web. 22 Jul. 2016. ‹https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/on_clitics.pdf›.

Unclogging the Sink: Avoiding Center-Embedding with Subordinating Verbs

Grammar Musings, , , , , , ,

While working on the chapter on verb morphology in the revised Ayeri grammar I’ve been working on all the way since July, I had to stop the other day and consider how to deal with participles. With regards to Ayeri, these are the infinite subordinated verbs which appear together with verbs that may take another verb – or even a whole phrase headed by such an infinite verb – as a complement:

    1. [gloss]Cunyo makayam perinang.
      Cun-yo maka-yam perin-ang
      begin-3SG.N shine-PTCP sun-A[/gloss]
      ‘The sun began to shine.’
    2. [gloss]Manangyeng pengalyam badanas saha yena.
      Manang=yeng pengal-yam badan-as saha yena
      avoid=3SG.F.A meet-PTCP father-P in.law 3SG.F.GEN[/gloss]
      ‘She avoids to meet her father-in-law.’

Example (1a) shows two intransitive verbs being combined, cun- ‘begin’ (subordinating) and maka- ‘shine’ (complement); example (1b) illustrates an intransitive verb which takes a transitive verb as a complement, manang- ‘avoid’ (subordinating) and pengal- ‘meet’ (complement). We can also observe word order differences in that the agent NP in (1a) follows the initial verb complex while the agent NP is an enclitic pronoun directly following its governing verb in (1b), which is not surprising, since agent pronouns take verbs as clitic hosts. That is, the agent pronoun -yeng ‘she’ (3SG.F.A) bundles together with its governing verb manang- ‘avoid’ rather than cliticizing to the whole verb phrase,[1. If Ayeri has such a thing, which is kind of a problem for me right now. I need to read up on VSO-language syntax before I can make conclusive claims.] i.e. appending -yeng ‘she’ (3SG.F.A) to pengalyam ‘meeting’. As far as describing the morphology of participles goes, we are basically done here, and this is also where I stopped thinking previously.

However, if we actually continue from here and take a morphosyntactic point of view, an interesting question arises: what happens to the constituents’ linearization if we (a) use full NPs instead of cliticized agent pronouns, and (b) not only combine an intransitive verb with a transitive one, but try all possible combinations–intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, and any of these with adverbial adjuncts? I think that for the sake of sketching out my thoughts here, it won’t be necessessary to give examples of all 18 possible combinations, since the more complex cases should all be treated alike anyway.

Assuming that she in (1b) is Maha, who just doesn’t get along with her husband’s father, where does the agent NP go? As noted above, the position of the agent clitic is somewhat special, so I take it that (1a) should be the basic word order. Thus, for (1b), we get:

  1. [gloss]Manangye pengalyam badanas saha yena ang Maha.
    Manang-ye pengal-yam badan-as saha yena ang= Maha
    avoid-3SG.F meet-PTCP father-P in.law 3SG.F.GEN A= Maha[/gloss]
    ‘Maha avoids to meet her father-in-law.’

Besides the fact that the agent winds up at the very end of the clause instead of at its otherwise preferred position after the verb, this still seems to be comprehensible. What happens, however, if we use a transitive subordinating verb? The dictionary, for instance, lists pinya- ‘ask (s.o. to do sth.)’ as a candidate. With regards to the normal constituent order of Ayeri, we can assume that the patient NP will follow the agent one:

  1. [gloss]Ang pinyaya sahayam   Yan sa Pila.
    Ang pinya-ya saha-yam Ø= Yan sa= Pila
    AT ask-3SG.M go-PTCP TOP= Yan P= Pila[/gloss]
    ‘Yan asks Pila to go.’

This also still looks very harmless with regards to parsability. However, things become more complicated if we increase the complexity of the embedded phrase by making the subordinate verb transitive (4a) or even ditransitive (4b):

    1. [gloss]Ang pinyaya konjam inunas   Yan sa Pila.
      Ang pinya-ya kond-yam inun-as Ø= Yan sa= Pila
      AT ask-3SG.M eat-PTCP fish-P TOP= Yan P= Pila[/gloss]
      ‘Yan asks Pila to eat the fish.’
    2. [gloss]Ang pinyaya ilyam koyaley ledanyam yana   Yan sa Pila.
      Ang pinya-ya il-yam koya-ley ledan-yam yana Ø= Yan sa= Pila
      AT ask-3SG.M give-PTCP book-P.INAN friend-DAT 3SG.M.GEN TOP= Yan P= Pila[/gloss]
      ‘Yan asks Pila to give the book to his friend.’

The distance between the subordinating verb and its arguments grows by the increasing number of constituents in the embedded phrase, which in turn becomes increasingly “deep” in terms of underlying syntactic structure or “heavy” with regards to syntactic weight. The parser in both the speaker’s and the listener’s brain thus has to keep track of more and more relations in parallel. In terms of information flow, this does not strike me as beneficial or intuitive either to a speaker constructing the phrase, or to a listener having to decode the utterance. For the same reason, there is already a rule that relative clauses constitute “heavy” elements which pull their referent NP all the way to the back of the clause to keep the upper right field free of clutter. While (4a) is a little awkward since there are two patients to keep track of at the same time and at the time the first patient NP occurs we don’t know yet whether -ya is just for agreement or a cliticized agent-topic pronoun, example (4b) seems even more impenetrable with its three referents in the embedded clause and two in the matrix clause, placed at the end. Putting less important information before important information also goes against information-flow intuition.[1. Hat-tip to Oliver Schallert (blog article in German).] Restructuring seems advisable here, thus, and there are two possibilities:

    1. [gloss]Ang pinyaya _i   Yan sa Pila [ilyam koyaley ledanyam yana]i.
      Ang pinya-ya   Ø= Yan sa= Pila il-yam koya-ley ledan-yam yana
      AT ask-3SG.M   TOP= Yan P= Pila give-PTCP book-P.INAN friend-DAT 3SG.M.GEN[/gloss]
      ‘Yan asks Pila to give the book to his friend.’
    2. [gloss]Ang (dai-)pinyaya   Yan sa Pila [, ang ilye koyaley ledanyam yana]i.
      Ang (da=)pinya-ya Ø= Yan sa= Pila ang il=ye.Ø koya-ley ledan-yam yana
      AT (so=)ask-3SG.M TOP= Yan P= Pila AT give=3SG.F.TOP book-P.INAN friend-DAT 3SG.M.GEN[/gloss]
      ‘Yan asks Pila to give the book to his friend.’

In the past I might have preferred (5a) as a solution, but since the analogy to relative clauses suggests itself and complement clauses are useful, I find that I tend towards the sentence in (5b) currently. To indicate that the sentence structure has been remodeled and information will be following, it might also be useful to add the da- particle to the verb: a more literal translation of (5b) could be ‘Yan asks Pila such that she give the book to his friend.’ Either way, however, the normal VSO word order is restored this way, important information is present early on, and the heavy constituent is banned to the back. Information should now be able to flow easily again.

Update on the Grammar Writing Process

Soapbox, , ,

Draft for the 2016 Ayeri grammar cover
Draft for the 2016 Ayeri grammar cover
At the moment I’m still working on rewriting the grammar. It’s at about 150 pages of content proper now (at regular copy paper size, no less) and I’m working on describing the morphology of the verb right now. Much more still needs to be written, for instance, the chapter on syntax. It’s proven useful to some degree that I’ve already written blog posts detailing the one or the other issue in the past. In these cases, I could simply adapt what I had written before, which sped up the writing process a little. Other than that, I’ve more or less come to mostly ignore what I had written some 5 years ago, since most of it was not very detailed anyway. The new grammar will thus be completely rewritten for the most part, not merely adapted to LaTeX and with extended contents.

For the past four months I’ve tried to basically return to the mode in which I worked on my MA thesis last winter, which involved writing at least 1–2 pages every day. This seems to be the most workable way for me, since taking too long breaks has proven deadly with regards to motivation before. Thus, permanence is probably a virtue with such things, at least as far as I’m concerned, and seeing things grow in manageable increments effectively counters the paralysing fear of the whole mountain of work. Since life is life, however, I have not managed to keep this schedule up very strictly, but I’m still trying to do my best.

At the top of this article, you can see a front cover draft I’ve come up with some weeks ago. My current motivation is to finish writing this thing this time, and to then print out a full copy and have that bound as a reward to myself. It won’t be quite like a real book, of course, but it will still be something I can proudly put on my shelf as an Achievement. I’ve already written an 80-page MA thesis before, so I know I can manage this as well if I want to, even though this time it’s likely going to be three times as long. Plus, if I manage this, I suppose a PhD thesis will also be manageable.

You can still find all the source files in my GitHub repository at https://github.com/carbeck/ayerigrammar/. There’s also a PDF of the most recently compiled version of the grammar there, as well as an overview of the topics covered so far.

Link: Ayeri Grammar GitHub Repo

This place has been going rather quiet for the past 2 months, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on Ayeri—quite the opposite, in fact. While there hasn’t been much activity here on this blog, a lot more is currently going on at the Ayeri Grammar repository on the code-sharing site, GitHub.

I’ve been trying to add a few pages every day for the past 7 weeks so that I am currently at about 110 pages (examples and tables take up so much space!). Since the whole thing is quite a bit in flux, I don’t want to give a straight download link to the fully compiled document yet, but you can nonetheless take a look at everything I’ve written so far.

The North Wind and the Sun, Revisited

Translations, , , , , , ,

For the past few days, I have been retranslating the story by Aesop, “The North Wind and the Sun.” While translating, two things came up to consider:

  • How does Ayeri deal with gender resolution (Corbett 243–253)?
  • How does Ayeri handle “the … the …” and “as … as …” constructions? Does it have them at all, or will rephrasing be necessary when translating from e.g. English?

Regarding the latter question, there is a blog article, “Correlative Conjunctions” (2012-12-10), but it fails to account for the two combinations mentioned above.

  • Aesop. “The North Wind and the Sun.” Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Ed. International Phonetic Association. 9th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 39. Print.
  • Corbett, Greville G. Agreement. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics 52. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Translation Challenge: Fences and Gardens

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Excerpt from Heidelberg Univ. Lib., Cod. Pal. germ. 164, fol. 17r (CC BY-SA)
Excerpt from Heidelberg Univ. Lib., Cod. Pal. germ. 164, fol. 17r (CC BY-SA; Source)
I am still busy collecting data for my MA thesis, but what with all the work during the day, I still needed to do something creative at night (and weekends), so I spent the last two-ish weeks working on a translation challenge I gave myself: one of the 13th century deeds I had come across during work that looked rather straightforward.

So if you’re curious about part of my current day job, want to see a first attempt at making up a sentence fragment in ‘Vaporlang’ and also look for some thorough annotation pointing out some Middle High German idioms (English translations provided and everything), you can download my translation here:

Fences and Gardens: An Ayeri Translation of a Medieval Neighborhood Dispute.

  • Demske, Ulrike. Merkmale und Relationen: Diachrone Studien zur Nominalphrase des Deutschen. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001. Print. Studia Linguistica Germanica 56.
  • Eike von Repgow. Sachsenspiegel. Heidelberg Manuscript, Cod. Pal. germ. 164. 17r. Eastern Middle Germany, 14th c. Heidelberger historische Bestände digital. Heidelberg University Library, n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. ‹http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg164/0047›. CC BY-SA.
  • “N 163 (381 a).” Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden bis zum Jahr 1300. Ed. Helmut de Boor et al. Vol. 5. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2004. 127. Print.

You’ve Got Mail

Soapbox, , , , ,

A while ago, David J. Peterson – prolific creator of languages for Hollywood – asked me about maybe providing him with a sample of my fictional language’s script for his new book, The Art of Language Invention. Since I’ve known David from fictional-language venues on the internet for a while and admire his relentless spreading the word that languages are fascinating things to explore (and also to build), I was happy and flattered about his request and sent something. And look what arrived in the mail today! In his book, David found some very kind words on Ayeri (among others):

To date, the best languages ever created were not created for television series or movies, but were created just for the joy of it – languages like […] Carsten Becker’s Ayeri […] — Peterson 15

Goes down like oil, as we say in German … (Heads up conlangers: any idioms in your languages that express feeling flattered?) And on Ayeri’s script, Tahano Hikamu, he writes:

I was aiming to create something that could sit alongside some of the other outstanding conscripts that had been created by conlangers, like Carsten Becker’s Tahano Hikamu […] — Peterson 249

Athdavrazar, David, thanks a ton!

  • Peterson, David J. The Art of Langauge Invention. From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building. New York: Penguin Books, 2015. Print.

Natlang Attestation of Ayeri’s Strategy of Forming Ordinals

Grammar Musings, , , , , ,

I was actually reading one of the papers I was intending to read tonight and came across this, on (Classical) Tibetan:

The suffix -pa forms a noun from another noun, meaning ‘associated with N’ (e.g. rta ‘horse,’ rta-pa ‘horseman,’ yi-ge ‘letter,’ yi-ge-pa ‘one who holds a letter of office,’ cf. Beyer 1992: 117). When suffixed to cardinal numbers this suffix forms ordinals (e.g. gsum ‘three,’ gsum-pa ‘third’; bcu ‘ten,’ bcu-pa ‘tenth’). — Chung et al. 626

Ayeri does basically the same thing with -an, cf. First, at First, Once, First Time:

    1. rig- ‘draw’
    2. rigan ‘drawing’
    1. avan ‘soil, bottom’
    2. avanan ‘foundation, base’
    1. men ‘one’
    2. menan ‘first’
    1. ito ‘seven’
    2. itan ‘seventh’

Chung et al. don’t say whether Tibetan treats these derived forms as nouns or as numerals or whether it makes that distinction at all, unfortunately. In Ayeri, however, ordinals are basically nouns due to the derivational suffix -an forming nouns, typically from verbs and adjectives, but also from other nouns.

  • Beyer, S. The Classical Tibetan Language. New York: State U of New York P, 1992. Print.
  • Chung, Karen Steffen, Nathan W. Hill and Jackson T.-S. Sun. “Sino-Tibetan.” The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology. Eds. Rochelle Lieber and Pavol Štekauer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 609–650. Print.