Linguistic Group project

LING100-002 Final Project: Creating a constructed language

Due Date: August 14, 2020

Overview

For this project, you will be working in a group to create an artificial language, and writing a descriptive grammar for it. The grammar must contain five sections (described below). Each person in the group is responsible for designing a different part of the language, and you will combine all of your work at the end and submit a single document.

Group breakdown

Each group member is responsible for one of these five sections. If you are not able to form a group of five, contact your TA to make the necessary arrangements.

Section 1: Phonology Responsibilities: phoneme inventory, syllable structure, phonological rules

Section 2: Writing System and Lexicon Responsibilities: writing system, list of all words, list of grammatical categories

Section 3: Morphology Responsibilities: verb paradigm, noun morphology

Section 4: Syntax Responsibilities: word order rules, generative grammar, syntax trees

Section 5: Semantics Responsibilities: describing the verb paradigm, one other semantic distinction

Grading 70% of your grade is based on your section. 30% of your grade is based on how well the entire project comes together.

The individual grade is based on how well your section adheres to the guidelines. These guidelines are given later on in this document. Read your section carefully.

The group portion of the grade is based on how well the entire document fits together. Your project should be a coherent description of a single language. It shouldn't look like five people worked independently and then stapled their work together. Two important considerations for this overall grade:

- Example morphemes only contain phonemes listed in the inventory chart

- Rules must be consistently followed throughout the document. Morphemes given as examples must follow any relevant phonological or morphological rules, and sentences given as examples must follow the syntactic rules.

You will be given a grade letter for your section, and a grade letter for the group section. Grading will roughly follow this scale:

A level: The section exceeds requirements. The language is described coherently and in detail. It shows a high degree of creativity and originality, and goes beyond the basic linguistics covered this semester.

B level: The section follows all of the guidelines. All the required elements are present. The language is well described and shows some creativity. There is appropriate use of terms and concepts that were taught in lecture and tutorial.

C level: The section follows some of the guidelines. Some required elements may be missing, poorly explained, or simply copied from an existing language. There may be some incorrect use of terms and concepts from linguistics.

D level: The section follows few or no guidelines. Multiple required elements are missing, the formatting is incorrect, and the description of the language is incoherent or over-simplified. There are major mistakes in the way that terms and concepts are employed.

The Tagtak language

There is a full example project on Connect for an invented language called Tagtak. Read through it to get an idea of how to structure your own project. You don't need to follow the Tagtak example too closely, as long as you meet the requirements for your section. There's plenty of room for you to be creative.

Resources

There are a few places you can look for ideas. The textbook and lecture slides contain many examples of languages from around the world, and they will be a good starting point. The World Atlas of Language Structures has lots of good information about typology. For phoneme inventories specifically, the PHOIBLE database and UPSID are good places to look. Wikipedia, while not an academic resource, can also be useful. The page on "grammatical categories" has many examples of categories you might want to include in your language. For drawing syntax trees, you may find the TreeForm software useful.

WALS: www.wals.info PHOIBLE: http://phoible.org/ UPSID: http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid.html Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_category TreeForm: https://sourceforge.net/projects/treeform/

How to give example data Throughout your project, you will need to invent words and sentences in order to provide examples of how your language works. Whenever you give examples, you must use IPA-style transcriptions. Use the Tagtak project as a guide.

Keep your examples as short as possible. In the phonology and morphology sections, you will be able to give examples that are just one word long most of the time. In the syntax and semantics sections, you will need longer examples, try to keep it simple. Sentences with a simple structure like "subject verb object" are sufficient.

The examples you provide do not need to be written using your language's writing system. If you want to do this, you must still include the IPA-style transcription too. The only exception is in the "writing system" and "lexicon" sections, where it is necessary to present examples using the writing system.

Anytime you give an example, you must provide a translation too. If you are giving examples of something phonological, you should give first the underlying form (no rules applied), then the surface form (with any rules that apply), and then the translation. Here is an example from Tagtak, showing a rule that makes voiceless stops become voiced between vowels:

/iti/ [idi] "sheep" /topa/ [toba] "tool for digging"

If you are giving examples of words with multiple morphemes, you will need to give a breakdown of what all the morphemes are. This should be done using a three-line system that is common in linguistics. Here's are some examples from Tagtak:

kwomi-xu-ga-zu titi walk-PL-3-IMM.FUT here "They are just about to arrive"

sasazu-ju-twa-pi talk.on.phone-SG-1-IMM.PAST "I just got off the phone"

The first line is the IPA transcription with morpheme breaks indicated by hyphens. The second line is a morpheme-by-morpheme breakdown. The third line is the English translation. The second line is called the "gloss", and there are some rules:

- If a morpheme can be translated to a single morpheme in English, then just write the English morpheme in the gloss. For example [kwomi] is glossed as "walk".

- If the morpheme would be translated by more than one word in English, then separate each with a period in the gloss. For example [sasazu] is glossed as "talk.on.phone".

- If the morpheme is a grammatical category, like "plural" or "3rd person", then come up with a short abbreviation and write it in small capital letters. A list of all these abbreviations must appear in the "Lexicon" section of your project.

- Where possible, try to line up the morphemes on line one and line two.

PHONOLOGY This section consists of three parts: phoneme inventory, syllable structure, and phonological rules.

Phoneme Inventory

The inventory is the collection of consonants and vowels found in a language. You should give an IPA- style chart showing the consonants, and another one showing the vowels. Describe each chart in a few sentences.

You need to plan your language's phonology around some specific phonetic feature, and you need to say what the feature is. The example language Tagtak makes extensive use of lip rounding, and virtually every consonant has a rounded and unrounded version. Phonological rules in Tagtak make reference to rounding, and special things happen with /w/ and rounded vowels.

Your language can use rounding too, or you can choose any number of other phonetic features. For example, your language might have voiced and voiceless versions of each consonant, or maybe every alveolar sound has a corresponding retroflex sound, or perhaps all the vowels can be nasalized.

Syllable Structure For this section, you have three options. You only need to indicate which option you have selected. Nothing else is required.

Option 1: CV syllables. In this kind of language, syllables consist of either a vowel, or a consonant and a vowel. Sequences of consonants never occur, and syllables cannot end with a consonant. Words like [tabikalo] or [uikaoo] are fine, but not words like *[kot] or *[tabkalto]

Option 2: CVC syllables. In this kind of language, syllables can consist of a vowel, a vowel with a single consonant on either side, or a single consonant on both sides. Words like [taou], [tak], or [tabkat] are fine, but not words like *[stolm] or *[strolikst]

Option 3: CCVCC syllables. In this kind of language, syllables can consist of a vowel, and up to two consonants on either side of the vowel. This would permit syllables as a simple as [i] and as complex as [strubkt].

Phonological Rules

You must create three phonological rules. Two of your phonological rules should be sound-changing rules. The third one should be either an insertion or deletion rule. For one of the rules, describe an exception to it. This exception can refer to a class of sounds (e.g. a rule that applies to all consonants, except nasals), or it can refer to a particular environment (e.g. a rule that makes voiceless sounds become voiced, except at the end of a word).

Keep in mind that phonological rules do not randomly shift things around - they generally have a phonetic basis. In Tagtak, for example, consonants become rounded before rounded vowels. For each of the rules, you should give examples of at least three words where the rules apply. Give an underlying form (before any rules apply) and a surface form (after any rules apply).

WRITING SYSTEM

You may choose any sound-based writing system (e.g. alphabet, syllabary, etc.). Meaning- based systems (i.e. logographic) are NOT permitted for this project.

Give a full table listing all of the symbols in the writing system, and show what their phonetic values are using the IPA. Every phoneme from the phonological inventory has to be represented here. Not every sound needs to have its own unique symbol, however.

Explain whether the writing system is more phonological or more phonetic. Provide examples of how phonological rules are, or are not, represented in the writing system. If your writing system has digraphs, or has symbols with multiple possible pronunciations, explain that.

Discuss some other aspect of the writing system, of your choice. Some examples to think about: spelling rules, the historical development of the writing, or special punctuation marks. You are free to come up with other examples too - be creative here.

The individual responsible for the writing system section is also responsible for the lexicon section at the end.

MORPHOLOGY

For this project, you must design a non-isolating language. Your language can be more fusional or more agglutinative, but there must be some degree of synthesis.

The morphology section consists of two parts: a full verb paradigm, and some noun morphology.

Verb paradigm There are three elements of verbs which you need to show in this section:

Show how your language marks the grammatical person of a subject of a verb. There are three grammatical persons: 1st person (the speaker), 2nd person (the listener), 3rd person (anyone else). You must discuss all three.

Show how your language marks the grammatical number of the subject of a verb. Your language must at minimum indicate the difference between a singular and a plural subject. Many languages use other numbers as well, such as dual (exactly 2), trial (exactly 3), and paucal (a small number, less than plural). You are free to choose other categories if you like.

Pick one of the following and show how your language indicates it: tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality. Within your chosen category, you must show at least three different distinctions that can be made, but you are free to decide exactly what those distinctions should be. In the Tagtak example, verbs are inflected for tense, and there are five different tenses.

As much as possible, try to represent this information using tables. Do not simply make a long list of all the affixes in your language. The Tagtak example uses one large table, but you are free to break this down into multiple tables, depending on what works best for your language's morphology.

You need to give one example verb that shows all of the affixes added at once. Discuss the relative ordering of affixes if necessary. For example, if both subject and tense are indicated by suffixes, you should mention what order they go in.

Noun morphology

You need to show one inflectional affix that attaches to nouns, and one derivational affix. Give at least two examples of each, by showing a word with and without the affix. One of these affixes should have two allomorphs. Describe the environments for each allomorph.

SYNTAX

Word order Give the relative word order of the subject, verb, and object in your language. Give two example sentences, one with an intransitive verb (subject only) and one with a transitive verb (subject and object).

Noun phrase Describe the relative ordering of nouns and adjectives. Say if your language uses prepositions or postpositions. Give one example noun phrase with adjectives, and give one example of a prepositional/postpositional phrase.

Generative grammar Give a generative grammar that includes S, NP, VP, AP, and PP. The grammar only needs to include all the relevant phrases and lexical categories. It does not need to include a full list of lexical items (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions), since these should all be listed in the Lexicon section anyway.

Using this grammar, give three example sentences along with syntax trees. Each tree needs to have a different structure. You do not need to indicate morphemes in these trees. If a word has multiple morphemes, simply write it as a single word and place it in the appropriate lexical category.

SEMANTICS

In this section, you will need to discuss two different semantic distinctions in the language. The first must be the verb category chosen in the morphology section. In Tagtak, the chosen verb category was tense, so tense is also discussed in the semantics section. The second category is entirely up to you. In Tagtak, the second category involved special suffixes on verbs of motion, but you can pick anything that you like. Here are a few categories you could consider: family relationships, colours, numbers, shapes, movement, locations.

An important part of the semantics section is talking about context. You need to discuss how the various semantic distinctions are actually used, not merely give a list of them. You will need to invent example sentences to illustrate your point. In Tagtak, the semantics section discusses immediate and remote verb tenses, and gives examples of contexts where these tenses are used. For the Tagtak motion suffixes, a single verb is given with different suffixes to show the variety of meanings they can express.

LEXICON

This section comes at the very end. It should consist of a list of every morpheme that appears in the document somewhere. Each morpheme should be listed first in the language's writing system, then as an IPA transcription, then as an English translation. Put the words in "alphabetical order", whatever that means for your language's writing system. Tagtak uses the Roman alphabet, and the lexicon is organized in the canonical ABC order. Everything that is a grammatical category (for example, morphemes that mean "plural" or "past tense") should also be listed here, but separately from the other morphemes.

The person responsible for the lexicon is also responsible for the writing system.