Re: S7 grammar in a nutshell (long)

Henrik:
> I put a new conlang online.  It does not yet have a name;
> preliminarily, it will be called 'S7'.
>
> A feature list:
>
>   - a-priori
>   - totally regular
>   - fluid-S active case system
>   - primarily head-first
>   - primarily head-marking
>   - VOS word order (=~ predicate, patient, agent)
>   - only one open lexical class (e.g. call them substantives)
>   - polysynthetic: there is an open class of clitics (certain
>     substantives can be reduced)
>   - underspecified by default
>   - extremely precise on demand
>   - mandatory categories: case, valence and evidence
>   - optional, coarse- or fine-grained or vague degree modifiers
>
> Comments appreciated!
Case: How many cases? What is the max number of arguments a
predicate can have?
You could, like Livagian, use alternate case frames as a kind of
polysemy-generating device.

The rest is all very much to my tastes, except:

Head-first, VOS. I prefer to have all orders possible. This allows
information sequencing to be in the domain of pragmatics, and
it allows light phrases to be ordered before heavy, thus making
sentences more processable.

Clitics. I'm not sure what functional virtue these have.

Why should evidence be mandatory? Case and valence are necessary
for an unambiguous parse, but evidence isn't. I'd have thought
it should be unspecified by default.

> I'd like to present a brief overview of my current project S7.  (The
> language does not yet have a good name.)  Please give me feedback
> about what you think of this.
>
>
> S7 Features
> -----------
>
> Design goals:
>   - polysynthetic
>
>   - rich derivational expressiveness
I don't see much virtue in derivational morphology; it merely
reduplicates syntax, so needlessly complicates the grammar.

>   - optional categories instead of mandatory ones, thus
>     underspecification by default and precision on demand.
>     This is to achieve feasibility for both poetry and law.
Fine, except that while law requires precision, poetry does
not inherently require imprecision. However, *conversation*
tends to require imprecision.

>   - minimal grammar-only affix inventory, maximal degree of
>     lexicon ~ grammar coincedence (e.g. tenses are also
>     free-standing words as are aspects etc.)
Why have affixes at all? My preferences are either (i) all
affixes are functional, and there are no function words, or
(ii) there are no affixes.

> Achievements:
>   - Only valence and degree infixes are grammar-only and thus
>     not found in the lexicon but in the grammar description.
>     (Degree will not be discussed in this short overview.)
Why are degree infixes not open class words?

>     The part of a stem without the classifier consonant will be called
>     'clitic': it is an item that is derived from a stem, but cannot be
>     used independently.
This is a very misleading term: 'clitics' aren't clitics.

> Phrases:
>   - To make a word complete, the GAP has to be filled.  There
>     are two possibilities:
>
>        a) You want a predicate: add a valence vowel
>        b) You don't: add a case vowel
It sounds like they're all predicates, but not all predications;
that is, valence vowel = predication = has truthvalue; case
vowel = argument of a predicate (expressed by the stem) = lacks
truthvalue.

--And.

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