Effability

Natural languages differ significantly in vocabulary

But it's extremely easy to borrow and to coin (content) words

E.g. gender

French

E.g. number

Japanese

E.g. tense

Suppose John thought yesterday morning, "Wow it's snowing right now!"

Russian

For your language

Some of these obligatory markers are grammatical agreement, but not all

• Gender
• Number
• Politeness
• Tense
• Aspect

You don't need to have such obligatory markers in your language

Negation

• All human languages have negation

• No evidence for negation in communication systems of other animals

See WALS for ways in which natural languages express negation

Quantifiers

All human languages have some ways of talking about quantities (if not all of the following)

• Quantificational determiners: all, some, no, many, most, numerals

• Focus sensitive operators: only, also, even

• Negative polarity items: any, ever

Not all quantificational meaning is lexicalized (e.g., Conservativity Universal)

For your language

At least find ways of expressing:

• Negation
• Basic quantification (every/all and some)

Other things are optional

Universal pragmatics

The core principles of pragmatics (e.g. the Gricean Maxims) are considered to be universal for all human languages

• If you are constructing a language for non-humans, you could consider changing some of these principles, e.g. What if we don't have the Maxim of Manner?

Scalar implicatures

• A or B ➠ Not(both A and B)
• Some As are Bs ➠ Not all As are Bs

Ad hoc implicatures

Languages differ in vocabulary and that may affect implicatures

Japanese

Ad hoc implicatures in English

Politeness

• Behavioural vs. linguistic politeness

• An example of linguistic politeness is polite pronouns

  • Many languages encode politeness in 2nd person pronouns, e.g. tú vs. usted in Spanish

  • Common to 're-use' morphology: tu vs. vous (2pl) in French, tu vs. Lei (3sgf) in Italian

  • Languages like Japanese and Thai have a lot of 1st and 2nd person pronouns, some encoding politeness

Politeness markers

Some languages use special politeness morphology

• Case particles in Korean, e.g. -kkeseo vs. -ga/i (nominative)

• Nominal morphology, e.g. Mr. in English, (go-)koonyuu 'purchase' in Japanese

• Verbal morphology, e.g. Japanese politeness verbs

  • Hearer politeness, e.g. -mas-, haiken-suru vs. mi- 'see'
  • Subject honorifics, e.g. irasshar- vs. ku- 'come'
  • Object honorifics, e.g. o-mikake-suru vs. mikake- 'glimpse'

Diminutives

Diminutives (e.g. -(t)je in Dutch, -aki in Greek, xiǎo- in Mandarin Chinese) are morphemes that mean 'small'

They are often used to express intimacy

• Intimacy towards the referent, e.g. 'Look at this doll-DIM!'
• Intimacy towards the hearer, e.g. 'Let's read a book-DIM'

Cf. Klingon morphology

You could consider morphology encoding other types of added emotional meaning (e.g. anger, admiration, hatred, disgust) for your language

Final essay

• Max 3,000 words (not very strict)
• Category 2
• Deadline: noon, 24 January 2024

• Task: Construct a novel a priori language, describe its grammatical properties, and compare it to natural language

• Goal: Learn and use theoretical concepts and ideas in linguistics

• Your essay may, but need not, have a single narrative flow; It could look like a Wikipedia page with short paragraphs and bullet points in each section.
• All examples should be glossed according to the Leipzig glossing rules

Key points to discuss

1. Who the speakers/signers/users are + biological/cultural background

2. Phoneme inventory and syllable structure; Romanisation

3. Morphology: Rules for complex words (if any)

4. Syntax: Pronouns + rules (word order, dependency marking) for transitive and intransitive sentences, DPs. State them clearly. See the slides from Week 8

5. Semantics: Explain how to express negation and quantification

6. An example narrative/discourse with ≥5 sentences, including sentences with pronouns, complex DPs, negation, and quantification

Throughout, remark how your language is different from natural language

Optional components

You can discuss any further aspects, e.g.:

• Pragmatics
• Writing system
• Historical change
• Social variation
• More sentence types, e.g. polar and/or wh-questions, adverbs, relative clauses
• Formal grammatical properties

For any of these, you should try to mention suitable theoretical ideas with appropriate academic references (email me for advice)