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Wambaya is a Free-Word-Order natural non-Pama-Nyungan language with Serial-Verb Constructions. It is discussed in detail in Rachel Nordlinger’s doctoral work, which IMO has such intensive fieldwork it’s more like a Habilitationsschrift than like an ordinary dissertation, but whatever. (Her paper can...

https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/217030/Wambaya-fest-rev.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y says Wambaya has free word-order and serial-verb constructions and allows discontinuous constituents. It might be an inspiration for ways to achieve what you desire. In some SVCs in Wamba...

You may want to ban any user with the substring *loli* in their screenname. They’re probably trying to rope in pedophiles.

akam chinjir on the ZBB recommended we google the search string “nonconfigurational serial verb”. Doing so they (and I) found references to a language called Wambaya.
I haven’t read about it yet but it looks pretty relevant.

Although I should add I failed to mention that a verb can have more than one verbal noun, and it is possible that one is feminine and the other one or two are masculine, say. That might, or might not, be an “oops”. Isn’t it generally true for nouns that their gender doesn’t change as they decline? ...

VERB CLASSES! BECAUSE VERBS CAN BE MASCULINE OR FEMININE TOO! Thank you eldin, yes, that was helpful. My first thought is that this is kind of attested in Arabic. Verbal nouns (akin to infinitives in European languages) take a gender, quite unpredictably masculine or feminine among basic verbs but ...

What do you mean by "concordial verb classes"? I had quick look Lao Kou's Gearthnuns thread and I couldn't identify anything that could be called that. (That thread is very long though, and it's likely it is there somewhere.) See https://listserv.brown.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0710a&L=CONLANG&X=O31D1CE...

@Lao Kou, you may remember something relevant on CONLANG-L from Sep and Oct 2007. Does anyone know of any natlang(s) that have or had both free word-order and serial verb constructions? If so, what were these FWO SVC languages? And what strategies do or did they use to say which participant-nouns go...

yangfiretiger121 wrote: ↑

25 Jul 2019 05:52

... the palatial and velar lateral fricatives ...

Palatial sounds are made with the tongue pressed against the palace.

I assume autocorrect “corrected” palatal to palatial?

BTW if you want to allow interruptible phrases, where two verb-phrases in the same clause could each have a piece of the other between their own first part and last part, or their own verb and object, then it might be good to use double-marking; mark the heads to give clues which dependents they go ...

I tried to send him a Private Message but it's stuck in my "outbox." How do I send messages that are in "outbox" ? I believe that means it’s been sent but hasn’t been opened by the recipient yet. That’s right. If he hasn’t signed on to the board in a couple of months, odds are the quickest way to c...

Is it Finno-Japonic?

I have something to confess, but I can’t think of a precise way to word it right now. I’ll try again later.

Where did this thread go? I need more help with mudnes Alessio last posted 11 months ago, and was last active on this board 3 months ago. ————— This is your first post! Welcome to the CBB! Tell us a little about yourself? If you want? We have an “introductions” thread where you can do that, and als...

I think what “head” means may depend on which theoretical school the grammarian belongs to. The definition I was thinking of is frequently used and is this: If a word in the phrase is such that the entire phrase is the same part-of-speech as the word, then that word is the head-word of the phrase. S...

Nloki wrote: ↑

22 Jul 2019 14:26

Syntax.
Classical Nlokian is strongly head-final:
•Adjectives follow nouns.
•Verb auxiliaries come after main verbs.
•Relative clauses follow the noun they modify.

That’s head-initial.

IF you have a clause with two verbs and two object-nouns, and the nouns are the same case, same pragmatic status (definite/indefinite and/or specific/nonspecific or referential/nonreferential), gender, number, person, and anything else a verb could agree with; and one verb and one object-noun go tog...

@brblues:
I’ve read or started all of those.
I read Embassytown and yes, found it good.
The only one you’ve mentioned that I started, but haven’t yet finished, is “Railsea”. I’m not sure I will finish it. No particular reason.

.... However, I think most would agree from experience that the quickest and easiest way to make it look like you've done the diachronics is just to do the diachronics... Of course, as dormouse points out, "diachronics" doesn't necessarily mean "proto-language". Doing diachronics does imply a proto...

It is up to you.