Talk:Conlang/Advanced/Grammar/Government

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[edit] What to do with Intermediate syntax

I've moved this thread here from Talk:Conlang. — Pi zero (talk) 13:30, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Back in February, the fairly short Intermediate/Syntax section was mostly replaced with extensive materials including multiple subfiles (by a user Psygnisfive (Talk | contribs)). I have just altered the table of contents to bring this material out where we can see it. There seem to me to be several difficulties that need to be addressed.

• The material has a different style and tone than the other existing content of the wikibook.
• The material goes into a level of technical detail that seems out of place where it is. Part of this is probably that some of it is Advanced rather than Intermediate, part of it goes back to the style/tone, and... I'm not entirely sure if part of it is something else.
• There's a section on how to apply the material to conlanging, rather than each section being continuously grounded in the conlanging theme.

I'm not yet ready to suggest a strategy for addressing these problems — does anyone else have some thoughts on how to proceed? Putting the new files into the table of contents, so the new stuff can be seen in context, seemed like a reasonable first step. Myself, I'm going to meditate on it for a while, and perhaps I'll come up with a proposal. Pi zero (talk) 21:21, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree. On the one hand, it's very useful information and something that any conlanger should be aware of. But on the other hand, it's not really appropriate for the book; it's more linguistic than conlinguistic, if you know what I mean. It's definitely more Expert material than Intermediate. I suggest we move it there and try to rewrite in a more accessible tone; in particular I think that the Applying Knowledge section should be integrated into each of the other chapters rather than being the after-thought that it is. Ingolemo (talk) 15:48, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to this suggestion, and certainly it would be good for the Intermediate section to move this out to make room for more level-appropriate content. I don't have a concept of how to square it with my proposed delineation of a mission for the Advanced section (on the main page or the Advanced introduction); and it seems likely to swamp the existing Advanced content, if not the anticipated Advanced content as well. Admittedly, I have had in mind that the Advanced section ought to cover universals. Pi zero (talk) 19:53, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it obviously needs to be trimmed. It could probably go into the Advanced section under the guise of a chapter (or possibly subsection) on formal systems of analysis ("Phrases and Trees"); from there we could extract and/or prune all the content that isn't particularly relevant to that topic ("Linguistic Universals" would become a separate chapter independent from this, and "Parts of Speech" could largely be retained in the intermediate syntax section, though probably without the emphasis on phrases at the bottom)

Or, if that's too much work, we could simply try to pawn it off to the Linguistics Wikibook or something :) Ingolemo (talk) 00:36, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd like (if you've no objection to the delay) to try my hand at drafting a new overall outline for the Advanced section, into which this material could then be integrated with adjustments as you describe. This could take a few days, though honestly a week or three seems more likely; I'm not really set up for fast action on wikibooks, which is one of the reasons I've adopted a strategy, over the past six months or so, of plodding slowly along, shoring up and reinvigorating the overall structure of the book by inches. It somehow hadn't registered on me that the outline of the Advanced section would (of course) need upgrading in parallel with upgrades to the Intermediate section. Pi zero (talk) 17:46, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I'm ready to admit that it's unlikely I would get to this for a long while yet. Pi zero (talk) 03:51, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

As an intermediate conlanger who stumbled across this book, I was completely lost in the technical explanation. The verbiage is not clear. It's talking about theory of English. It needs to tell me about how to recreate a different theory in MY language. That's my two cents. The section on applying the knowledge is more like what I was expecting. The former material should be incorporated more simply into this, I think, as it retains the tone better and doesn't become a linguistics textbook. --162.95.216.224 (talk) 00:03, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Just so we're on the same level; PiZero, you're going to draft a plan and present it here within the next two or three months? If so, then that's fine by me — there's plenty of other tasks for me to complete in the meantime. And hey, changes will happen at whatever rate they happen. :) Ingolemo (talk) 05:01, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I'll try, though my draft "plan" probably won't amount to much. A potentially long time to wait for a pretty small result. I don't mean to stand in your way, though (but you say you've got plenty of other things to occupy you...). Pi zero (talk) 18:35, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Here's roughly how I envision rearranging the Advanced phonology and grammar sections. For all its faults, I still think it's considerably better than what we've got; but I don't imagine being able to write the content of most of the modules in it until we know much more clearly just what will be in the Intermediate section. At any rate, it clarifies how the government theory material would fit in.

• Introduction to the Advanced level
• Phonology
  • Common sounds, in depth — including subtleties of articulation, diphthongs, suprasegmentals
  • Unusual sounds — including pharyngeals, clicks, ingressives
  • Non-human phonologies
• Grammar
  • Aligning arguments — morphosyntactic alignment — including theta roles, non-acc, abs-erg, split-erg, Austronesian, active-stative, trigger, dechticaetiative
  • Forming words — including polysynthesis, incorporation, oligosynthesis, etc.
  • Constraints on natural languages — intro (relation to conlanging, anadewism, controversy); universals; government theory
  • Destroying the noun/verb distinction
• The link between a language and its culture
• Metaphor and its applications for conlanging
• The Grand Tome of Conlanging Vocabulary

Left to my own devices, all I'd do now is shift the modules about to fit this outline, including moving the government material into it to make room for Intermediate syntax. --Pi zero (talk) 16:45, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

That all sounds good to me.

On the subject of what to do in intermediate syntax, I'm begining to think it's not a good idea to enforce the division between syntax and morphology. It's a useful distinction linguistically, but I'm not so sure it helps when trying to actually explain grammatical concepts. The reason I say this is because I'm having quite a bit of trouble writing intermediate morphology without covering major topics in syntax at the same time.

I don't know if you've got any ideas, but with all that in mind, I'm seeing something like this;

• Intermediate Grammar
  • Nouns (nominal morphology and noun phrases, maybe prepositions as well)
  • Adjectives & Adverbs (adjectives, adverbs, determiners)
  • Verbs (verbal morphology and basic sentence structure)
  • Clauses (subordinate clauses)
  • Forms (affixes, clitics, word order; how to actually show the distinctions expressed by the grammar, this may be better as the first article in the section)

It still needs a bit of work, but I think that covers most of what we need it to. We'll probably need/want to split the more complicated pages up a little (separate pronouns and prepositions from nouns, clauses -> nominal clauses and relative clauses). What do you think? Ingolemo (talk) 02:50, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Very plausible. The division between morphology and syntax always has been rather messy. Your "Forms" section probably will naturally want to go first; "Clauses" will naturally want to go last; and it may turn out that "Adjectives & Adverbs" will want to go after "Verbs", as well as after "Nouns".

This means, of course, that in shifting this material to the Advanced part, the Intermediate/Syntax taxon will simply vanish from the outline. --Pi zero (talk) 14:19, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Okay. Unless there's any objections, I'll rename Intermediate Morphology to Intermediate Grammar and then start adapting from there. Ingolemo (talk) 17:13, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV (If That Exists Here)

Much of this is entirely theory-dependent, and a conlanger who follows these "instructions" will end up producing conlangs that can be analyzed by Chomskyan theories, and no others. This is not a good idea. The very point of natural language syntactic frameworks is to describe the languages that exist in the world, and to exclude all those that don't. The point of conlanging is different. At the very least, this should not be presented as *the* syntax section. Rather, it should be labeled "An Introduction to Chomskyan Syntax for Conlangers". Dedalvs (talk) 06:34, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh, good, a reason to throw it out after all. Though I have doubts that Chomsky's purpose has ever been "to describe the languages that exist in the world, and to exclude all those that don't."

And yes, NPOV exists here. --Pi zero (talk) 00:13, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

The language "Spanish with /e/ swapped with /o/ and /i/ swapped with /u/" is not spoken in the world, but which Chomskyan theory would reject it? --Damian Yerrick (talk) 20:30, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

I take Dedalvs's point to be that such theories attempt to exclude features that the theorist believes cannot occur naturally, whereas the conlanger might or might not care whether a feature can occur naturally — and if they do care, that doesn't mean they're trying to obey such constraints. That's why we've moved this material to a place in the outline reserved for theories that try to exclude unnatural features. --Pi zero (talk) 22:20, 30 June 2009 (UTC)