Re: free word-order conlangs

Eldin Raigmore, On 17/07/2006 18:14:
> I can't even imagine why I would want to allow phrases to "leave their home
> clauses" and move around the sentence.  Does that occur in any natlang?  If
> so, does anyone on-list have an example?
"Clever, I know that he is."
"This, I am certain that you'll eat."

English has a grammatical device that will extract a phrase leftwards out of clauses,
for discoursal reasons.

The rationale for allowing phrases to leave their home clauses is that, as your
other comments acknowledge, there are discoursal reasons for it being desirable
to present/reveal/unfold information in a particular order, an order that may
involve a mismatch with the order you'd get by keeping everything in its home
phrase.

Take "Clever people are entitled to special educational privileges". By the topic &
focus ordering preferences you articulated for your conlangs, that would
transform into something like "Special educational privileges, people are
entitled to, when they're clever", or, with simple reordering "Special
educational privileges people entitled-to clever".

(Arguably topic/focus ought to be reflected by grammatical structure, not only by word
order, but there still remain general discoursal reasons for preferring a
particular order in which information is revealed.)

> If it occurs in a conlang, can anyone give me/us an example?
My Livagian, but via a device that redefines the 'home phrase' as wherever a phrase ends up.

[...]
>> 2. What mechanism allows the freedom (without ambiguity)?
>
> Haven't quite decided.
>
>> Rampant concord?
>
> I'm leaning towards this, and also towards case-marking.
I'm especially on the lookout for non-concord-based solutions.

[...]
> In any case I see no reason why Adpihi shouldn't be both head-marking and
> dependent-marking.
It depends on the other design goals. If brevity is one, then a surfeit of
inflection might work against that.

[...]
>> (To start the ball rolling: my Livagian has
>> no structural freedom
>
> What, _none_?
Every order is structurally distinct.

>> but lots of informational freedom, using a
>> mechanism other than rampant concord,
>
> Tell me/us about this mechanism.
I'm not sure how intelligible a succinct description would be...

If phrases X and Y combine to form Z, any unsaturated arguments of X or Y can
become arguments of Z, and so on recursively. So you can end up with, say, a
2-argument phrase meaning "I know that X told you that cows eat Y" (where X & Y
are the arguments). Or a 100-argument phrase.

>> and no limitation to certain subsentential domains.)
>
> Can you explain this in a little more detail?
How about the above description?

--And.