Talk:Conlang/Intermediate/Grammar

Marking morphological categories
Does anyone have any idea how we should explain the various ways of marking morphological categories; things like affixation, alternation, and reduplication? Since they're used throughout morphology, they don't really lend themselves to any of the existing pages. Should we add a new page for them? And what about syntactic ways of expressing these things, such as compound tenses or cases on determiners &mdash; should they be explained in the same place? I'm beginning to think that such a strict chapter structure (like the strong division between morphology and syntax) is the wrong approach for this book. Ingolemo (talk) 08:07, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Materials looking for a home
I've just pulled the following recently-added paragraphs out of Beginner/Grammar, on the grounds that they didn't seem to me to belong at the Beginner level. Perhaps they (or something like them) could find a home somewhere in this section.


 * [concerning "morphology" versus "syntax"]
 * Sometimes it's hard to draw the line between these terms. In Chinese (Mandarin), for example, the word to eat is 吃 chi1, like in 吃面 chi1mian4 to eat noodles. However, 吃 chi1 is not used alone, so to eat without any object is transtaled 吃饭 chi1fan4 (literally, to eat rice). It's hard to tell whether 吃面 chi1mian4 and 吃饭 chi1fan4 are phrases with a word 吃 chi1 or new words with a root 吃 chi1.




 * If one suffix is used for one property, language is called agglutinative, and if one suffix is used for several properties, then language is inflectional.


 * &mdash; author: 217.21.40.13 (talk)

--Pi zero (talk) 22:30, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I've added a section on the morphology/syntax distinction because we needed to talk about it a little more considering how much I've used it in the forms page. The piece you've quoted fit in fairly well so I've added that too. Ingolemo (talk) 10:07, 27 May 2009 (UTC)