Peshpeg: Difference between revisions

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-Peshpeg was originally a nominative-accusative language.  The language also had several noun classes that eventually collapsed into the present three-way declension system based on natural gender, animacy, and countability and concreteness.  Today, the language has developed into a split ergative system, based on the animacy hierarchy of the noun class system.  Nominative-accusative marking appears in first second pronominal forms, and Class I pronominal forms.  These pronominal forms lie on the upper end of the animacy hierarchy, while all other forms are considered low animacy forms.  Class II nouns were originally indeclinable and fell lower on the animacy scale, although they displayed some level of agency and thus took different affixes to denote their noun class.  As Minhast expanded into Peshpeg-speaking lands, agent marking developed in these lower animacy nouns through the incorporation of the Minhast ergative marker ''=de'', realized in Peshpeg Class II nouns as the submorpheme ''-d-''.  Agency for low animacy nouns is considered a marked condition, hence this explains the use of ergative morphology to indicate the marked condition.  The unmarked form was reinterpreted as the absolutive case.
+Peshpeg has four formal word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and particles.  Of these four parts of speech, nouns and verbs exhibit the most complex parts of the grammar of the language.
-As for the Class III nouns, they remained unmarked for both case and number.  This is unsurprising as these nouns are inherently uncountable, and statistically speaking, their role as agents is an uncommon, if not rare occurrence.  The nominative-accusative marking of Class I nouns and the ergative marking of Class II nouns are sufficient to disambiguate the semantic role a Class III noun when it is a core argument.  Ambiguity arises when two Class III nouns occupy both agent and patient roles in a transitive clause.  In those cases, it is usually assumed that if one of the nouns was mentioned in discourse before the other, that noun functions as the agent.  This indicates that in clause chains, Peshpeg employs an S/A pivot, in contrast to Minhast's S/O pivot.
+The nominal system is divided into a three-way declension system based on natural gender, animacy, and countability and concreteness.  The declension system underlies Peshpeg's unusual split-ergative alignment system.  Unlike other split systems, which either display tense-aspect based ergative marking (e.g. Hindi and most Indic languages), or pronominal-based splits (e.g. Minhast and Dyirbal), Peshpeg applies nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive marking based on noun class.  This noun class system is based on an animacy hierarchy.  Class I nouns, ranked as the most animate in the animacy hierarchy, takes nominative-accusative marking, whilst Class II nouns, which lie lower in the animacy hierarchy, take ergative-absolutive marking.  The final group of nouns, falling under Class III, receive no overt marking and therefore show direct alignment.
+Verbs fall under two broad classes.  One class, which is partially or fully synthetic, derives from an older system.  These verbs are usually high-frequency words, such as ''ru'' ("to go").  The other verb class involves a construction based on an unmarked verbal noun and an auxiliary which takes person, tense, and aspect marking.
+Adjectives typically do not take case or number marking, but derive them from their noun head.  They typically follow the noun head and are take the suffix ''-em'' if followed by another noun phrase.  If followed by a verb-auxiliary construct, however, the adjective precedes their head, joined to it by the particle ''mon'', argued by some linguists to be etymologically related to the Minhast connective ''min''.
+Particles are uninflected words, a lexically broad collection which include adverbs, negators, discourse markers, and various syntactic operators.
 ===Nouns===