Branching typologies

At 2:42 PM -0500 09/26/01, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
>I'm curious: what is the most common branching typology for our
>conlangs? Phaleran is very left-branching: SOV word order, relative
>clauses before the noun they modify, adjectival particles before
>the noun they modify.  Degaspregos was/is more right branching:
>although it has mainly SOV word order, relative clauses and
>adjectives usually come after the modified noun.
I'm getting the impression that Tepa is tending increasingly toward
holophrasis -- a sentence in a single word. There are of course
sentences with more than one word, but everything but the verb and
its accompanying clitic chain is strictly optional. The resulting
structure is somewhat flat, rather than left- or right-branching.
Since the verb is normally in first position, I suppose you could
call it verb-initial.

>You know what -- we should compile a brief synopsis of all types
>of conlinguistic typologies.  It would shed some light not so much
>on language, but rather more likely, on the conlanger population.
A while ago (two years? three years?) we were toying with a "conlang
code" (not the conlanger code so ably crafted by taliesin). The code
was basically a summary of the typological features of a language. It
included phoneme inventory, morpho-type, basic word order, and size
of the lexicon. I have my own version of the code which I'd be happy
to post to the list if there is interest.

Dirk
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