Re: Wordless language (WAS: NonVerbal Conlang?)

Hello!

I am still lurking, but haven't been following this thread very closely,
I'm afraid, interesting though it is. I can answer the queries about T4
(well remembered!) though. It's moved on significantly if fitfully since
the 2003 description Ray found, but Ray's point that T4 was never
designed to be wordless is well made.

Eldin:
>>>The conlang I meant to mention ... had just two "parts of
speech" -- "linkers" (a small closed class) and content-morphemes. ...
[I]n this conlang there is no difference between morphotactics
and syntax. The content-morphemes include many whose semantics
would strike a speaker of a natlang as "particles". <<<

That certainly describes T4 well. I didn't find it possible to reduce *all*
semantic elements to a single syntactic class without unacceptable
ambiguity, so T4 has two classes of element on the syntactic level. One
is closed ('linkers' or 'operators') and consists of three elements: an
element indicating the verb-object relation, its reverse (object-verb),
and a copula (realised as zero). The open-class words correspond to all
the content words, many of the function words, and many of the
bound morphemes of English. For example, most sentences begin with
a group of markers indicating number, tense, aspect and mood, but
the syntactic behaviour of each of these markers is identical to that
of any other open-class word. (DA-markers and delexical clitics have
been abandoned since the 2003 description.)

As Eldin says, the syntax is not divided into morphology and phrasal
syntax; there is a single rule for combining elements syntactically, and all
syntactic words are single morphemes. There are rather complicated
sandhi-type rules on the phonotactic level, and these operate on a unit
larger than the syntactic word but smaller than the sentence (and
which is not a syntactic constituent), which could be called the
phonological word if it weren't so discrepant with the syntactic word.

I hope this is relevant to the thread! Apologies if not. I have been
working on a T4 grammar sketch, but I'm entering the final year of my
PhD and have little time for such matters :(

Jonathan.

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