Verbjunct

Matthew McVeagh | my conlangs

Verbjunct is a language in the Grammar Experiment Suite of experimental languages.

No conjunctions – all conjunctional semantic content is affixed to the verb.

This idea is the conjunction equivalent of using case inflections rather than adpositions. Case inflections and adpositions have basically the same function: they both show what role a noun phrase plays in the clause and how it relates to other noun phrases and the verb. The difference between them is that adpositions are separate words while case inflections are affixes to words within the noun phrase, either the noun (with head-marking), noun-modifiers such as adjectives and determiners (with dependent-marking), or both (double-marking). Adpositions and conjunctions are often seen together as 'linking words', as they both join constituents to other constituents and express what relation the joining constituents have to those they are joining. Why then is there not an affixal equivalent of conjunctions, or a clause equivalent of case inflections? Verbjunct aims to try that out.

Why am I choosing the verb as the part of the clause to affix the clause-role to? There has to be a verb, and it's the nucleus of the clause, so that seems to be the place. An alternative might be the subject, if that is compulsory, or a topic/focus. You could have the verb early so the listener knows as soon as possible whether to consider this clause conditional, temporal, causal, co-ordinate etc., just as they do with conjunctions. On the other hand maybe that is not getting into the spirit of the idea, and it would be more interesting to delay the verb till later in the clause, maybe even the end.

Not all conjunctions join clauses: co-ordinate conjunctions are often used with individual words or phrases instead. For these situations a similar affix, effectively a clitic as with Latin -que or -ve, could be added to the word or phrase head.

The idea with Verbjunct is not to replace the function of conjunctions, or make it harder or impossible to say things. It's to switch the grammatical manner of marking the conjunctional meaning. The point is that we generally assume there need to be conjunctions. But we don't need conjunctions, we just need the semantic element that conjunctions represent. It's like someone with an analytic language assuming that a language has to have adpositions, or auxiliary verbs, because they've never thought of cases or inflected tenses.

Linguistics' understanding of grammar has progressed such that it now sees a group of grammatical-semantic functions which can be represented in three different ways:

1. affixal/inflectional

2. free morpheme particle

3. positional (word order)

Whether it's

• a noun phrase's role relative to the verb or another noun phrase (case/adposition/NP-V order)

• or TAMV type information for verb references (inflected tense/compound tense/a few word order verb differences e.g. subject inversion)

we now don't just see different morphologies and syntaxes, we see different morphological and syntactic solutions to the same underlying semantic requirements.

I can't imagine a word order solution to what conjunctions do. But I've found a synthetic alternative to what is usually assumed to require an analytic syntax.