The Dailies. October 17
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you’ve already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?
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Doing a whole lot of reading, but the most salient point this morning was this paper: Navajo Bipartite Verb
It proposes that the verb consists of disjunct + conjunct + stem and not of a verbal template with position classes.
So the idea that a verbal template with position classes is descriptive and useful for analysis but not at all a morphological structure is pretty important when designing a fusional polysynthetic. (Explains why affixation and incorporation is called construction in Akachenti but alternation of fused morphemes is inflection.)
Domains are discovered in the Navajo verb by distributional constraints, where certain clusters can only appear at the edge of a domain. The domains discovered are the disjunct for peripheral prefixes, the conjunct with inflecting stem or Istem, which encodes the subject and tense/mode of the verb, and the verb stem or Vstem, which includes includes a classifier and also encodes tense/mode (both conjunct and stem have to agree).
With this thought in mind, it’s a point that there are usually up to four person-marking slots on an Akachenti verb; these seem to occur at boundaries:
Prefixes can insert between the pre-auxiliary and the auxiliary or precede both, depending on the topicalization structure or mood of the verb. Technically, considering the negative infix, it’s possible that prefixes can appear in between any of these boundaries preceding the verb stem, and suffixes appear immediately after the verb stem but before a word-final pronominal suffix.
Also, taking this new way of thinking of the verb, topic-fronting is obligatory on the verb but a topic prefix is not. In general, the argument or prefix that is or refers to the topic is fronted and may have a topical allomorph.