Expression of Several Grammatical Meanings in Oral vs. Graphical Constructed Languages

Roman Viktorovich Tarasov,

Department of Applied and Experimental Linguistics, Leo Tolstoy Higher School of Russian and Foreign Philology, Institute of Philology and Intercultural Communication, Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia

This article attempts to discuss three grammatical meanings: tropative (‘X considers Y to be Z’), apparetive (‘X seems to be Y’) and causative in different types of constructed languages, or conlangs. While most of conlangs, as well as natural languages (NLs), possess an oral form (and thus are called oral), the others only have a written form based on semantics (and thus are graphical). Conlang typology has a low level of coverage. However, results of such studies might be extremely useful for general linguistics. The reason is that the derivational models of conlangs are chosen by their creators according to the aims of the languages. Thus, the language authors express their own judgment on difficulty/simplicity of language structures. So, the regularities of conlang typology might be used for explaining the typological universals. This project is the first attempt at studying conlangs with the same method as NLs, namely, the cross-sectional method described in my article (Tarasov 2021). The models of twenty oral conlangs (OCLs) are compared with those of four pasigraphies. Although the ranges of two samples are incommensurable, these are all the pasigraphies that are available for examination. The results of this article show that while in terms of tropative and apparetive, OCLs and pasigraphies behave differently (with both being different from NLs), they have much more in common both with each other and with NLs in terms of causative.

Keywords: Grammatical Meanings, Constructed Languages, Pasigraphies, Typology

 The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Ninth International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.LLLD.IR), 1-2 February 2024, Ahwaz.