Re: General Conlang Discussion
Posted: 2012-04-17, 4:29
I was playing around with my conlang's tense system, which has seven basic tenses but has a perfective distinction in only one of them (the pluperfect).
I wanted to see what would happen if the language's speakers extended some idiomatic uses for the relative future tenses to their counterparts in the other "core" tenses (from future to present to past) through analogy, but when I finished I realized that I'd essentially created a full complement of perfective tenses - the twist? They were only used in the negative.
What I want to know is (1) how realistic you think it is for a language to develop new dimensions in its verbal morphology through analogy and (2) whether you think polarity-dependent aspect distinctions are very unnatural or just quirky.
I wanted to see what would happen if the language's speakers extended some idiomatic uses for the relative future tenses to their counterparts in the other "core" tenses (from future to present to past) through analogy, but when I finished I realized that I'd essentially created a full complement of perfective tenses - the twist? They were only used in the negative.
What I want to know is (1) how realistic you think it is for a language to develop new dimensions in its verbal morphology through analogy and (2) whether you think polarity-dependent aspect distinctions are very unnatural or just quirky.