Re: movement

On 3/26/06, Jackson Moore <jacksonmoore@...> wrote:
> My questions for the moment concern variable word order, which seems
> to be a fairly constrained mechanism for expressing grammatical
> meaning.  Its uses in English are apparently limited to voice and
> mood, and idiosyncratically at that.
>
> Are there any constructed languages that were designed to maximize or
> systematize the portion of grammatical meaning expressed through the
> variation of word order?  How do analytic natural languages differ in
> the way they permutate word order?  Are there languages, constructed
> or natural, in which it is used for purposes other than voice and mood?
In one of my early conlangs I had adpositions which were prepositional
when expressing location and postpositional when expressing movement
(or the other way around; I don't recall).  I don't think it would work
well in practice; it would be too often ambigous (is this particle
expressing movement toward the previous noun or location at the
following noun? etc) -- unless maybe the adpositions inflect as they
move from one position to another, in which case why bother to
move them if the inflection fully marks their change of directionality
and therefore meaning?  OTOH, maybe a language that is
typically prepositional could use its prepositions postpositionally
when they form a sentential adverbial complement that comes
at the beginning of the sentence.

In a current, still fairly sketchy conlang I have adjectives following
the noun ordinarily, but preceding it when emphatic.

I think I've read somewhen in this list about a conlang that would
use the six V/S/O order variations to systematically express mood
(maybe some tense and aspect as well?).
I think maybe it had dummy subjects and objects to fill slots
as needed for intransitive and impersonal verbs and still have
the full specificication of work order for marking mood.

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

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