Re: Terminilogy-help needed

First off: Taruven has always been one of my favorite conlangs on the
web.  It's just really great work, from both an aesthetic and
linguistic perspective.

On Jan 24, 2007, at 8:36 AM, taliesin the storyteller wrote:
> The page concerns the word class/part of speech that I call
> "frontwords": a closed class of uninflectable words that go at
> the beginning/front of a clause/sentence. Unfortunately I have
> been asked about what a "backword" would be (Taruven certainly
> doesn't have any although "tal", the end-of-relative-sentence
> marker, comes close). Therefore, I'm looking for a better term.
I think "frontword" is fine, clever repartees about "backwords" be
damned.  Otherwise, you'll likely have to do with some kind of
circumlocution, such as "sentence initial particle."  You might also
consider appropriating a more traditional term, like "adverb" (as
others have suggested), taking care in your documentation of the word
class to note that they're always clause-initial.

That said, it seems unusual to me to find a part of speech classified
entirely on its order in the clause and not by its semantic/syntactic
distribution.  You might be able to side-step the terminology issue
altogether by including a section in your grammar called, say, "other
constructions," which includes subsections for imperatives (oah,
vren, jil), questions (vris, ei, etc.), and evidentiality (leneth).

... unless there's some other theoretical/intrafictional motivation
for the frontword analysis, in which case, of course, all bets are
off. :)

Adam

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