Inflection for attitude and purpose (was: Re: Nauradi)

On 11/25/08, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
>  > On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:46:37 -0500, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
>  >
>  >>For my next conlang I've toyed with the idea of making
>  >>attitudinality a mandatory inflectional category rather
>  >>than an optional derivation method.
.....

> I think this conlang, if I ever get around to developing it fully,
>  will have more degrees and kinds of attitudinality than gjâ-zym-byn
>  (which has five); exactly what I'm not sure yet.   Maybe in addition
>  to the positive respect / affection distinction, there would be a
>  negative fear / contempt distinction, and an "interest" or "amusement"
>  category in addition to gzb's "surprise" and "ambivalence".
>  I'm still figuring out what other inflectional categories would go
>  well with this one, or what other nebulous conlanging ideas
>  in my files it could go with to form a coherent language.
I worked on it some with my brother on Thanksgiving, and we
came up with a fairly coherent ten-way attitudinal inflection
prefix system, which interacts by sandhi with the five
purpose-inflection prefixes.  The attitudes marked are:

affection
respect
interest
amusement
surprise
bewilderment
defiance
contempt
fear
ambivalence

And the purposes marked are:

end-in-itself
useful for spiritial, aesthetic etc. purposes
useful for practical, survival, etc. purposes
useless or irrelevant
dangerous

At first I thought the purpose category should be
the basis of a set of noun classes, rather than
inflectional; but Brian convinced me that making
it inflectional would be productive.   The two
inflectional categories this conlang's nouns have
are not perfectly orthogonal -- some of the
positive attitude markings are unlikely to
cooccur with the "useless" or "dangerous"
purpose marking, for instance, and the
negative attitude markings would rarely
occur with the useful purpose markings.

Other aspects of the language, except the
phonology implied by our table of prefixes,
are still nebulous, but I think it will have relatively
simple verb inflection, with realis/irrealis and
maybe one other category; the irrealis to include
indicative statements with other than direct-experience
evidentiality.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/