Re: Unilang: the Syntax

A li'l question: How do you plan to mark yes-or-no questions in Unilang?
Intonation? Different word order, like in say Swedish? Auxiliary verb, like
English? Interogative mood?

For the record, my main conlang Tairezazh uses the "interogative adverb"
_fe_, that's placed after the verb. For good measure, the word order is
usually also rearranged to from SVO to SOV, but this isn't necessary, and
does not change an indicative sentence to a question by its own (having
inflected acc and dat forms, Tairezazh has a rather free word order).

                                                Andreas

Oskar Guldaugsson wrote:>
>I don't know if anyone noticed, but the order in which I've presented these
>threads is from the subjects I know best to the subjects I know worst.
>Phonology and phonetics are my linguistic favorites, and that's where I
>have the clearest and most confident ideas in what regards Unilang. The
>exception to this pattern will be the orthography, to be presented last,
>though I consider myself fairly knowledgeable of orthographic
>practicalities.
>
>Enough ranting; syntax is not my strong side, that's the point I was trying
>to make.
>
>At this point, syntactic considerations depend on morphological choices,
>and vice versa; depending on the morphological scheme, there are two
>syntactic schemes that I find viable:
>
>1. A rigid SVO word order with a preferred, fixed order of items; pretty
>much as in general Chinese syntax. For instance:
>
>[subject] - [temporal adverb] - [verbal adverb] - [verb] - [indirect
>object] - [object] - [emphatic particle]
>
>This is the order in Mandarin Chinese, AFAIK. Though I wouldn't necessarily
>adhere to this specific order, this is roughly descriptive of the first
>scheme. The main thing is that the order would be fixed.
>
>2. A somewhat freer word order through the realization of various
>morphological grammatic markings, primarily of case and part-of-speech. I
>am generally opposed to nominative ~ accusative marking in Unilang, so
>subjects would in any case be required to precede objects. Other than that,
>some form of case marking could set the indirect object free, and part-of-
>speech marking could leave more open the position of the verb and the
>adverbial items. In any case, SVO would be set up as a preferred syntactic
>pattern, though the above possibilites would allow for variation.
>
>As always, I am attracted to some kind of a mediation between the two
>choices.
>
>I guess I'm hoping for comments by someone more talented in syntax, who is
>otherwise interested in auxlanging; Raymond?
>
>Regards,
>Óskar
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