Conlangers

Make case inflection of participles affect the marker that forms the participle so much that in certain cases, different types of participles are conflated. E.g. "the robbing man" and "the robbed man" are distinct when these men also are the subjects or objects of some other verb, but when they're a comitative, the grammar doesn't give a shit whether they're robbed or robbing. This would be interesting with a slightly greater number of pariticple forms than English has, so something like recipient-participles and the product sets of tenses and voices, and not just a weird conflated thing like what English has (conflating present with active and passive with past).

Sargaĺk, much like its southern neighbours, has diminutives. It forms them in its own ways, however. Three common ways, of varying productiveness, are these:

Initial clipping: for many bisyllabic or longer nouns, the first syllable can be dropped or replaced by the vowel in it:

Derivational suffixes:

Stress movement: for many words, stress movement to the last syllable can be an indicator of diminutiveness.

The Sargaĺk gender system has a further subdivision – there is an animate vs. inanimate distinction as well. This does not appear very clearly in the case morphology, but in some constructions they are treated in different manners. This distinction cuts through both of the genders, in effect giving us a 2*2 gender system.

1. Causatives

An animate causer argument of a causative is in the pegative or nominative case (depending on how transitive the resulting verb phrase is). However, inanimate causers take a postposition - ips - which requires the accusative case.

(A further detail: there can at most be one constituent in the pegative case in a VP, so a structure like "A made B give C D" comes out with A in the pegative, B in the nominative, C in the nominative and D in the accusative. However, if A is inanimate, B is pegative.)

Coordination between subjects requires both to be marked the same way. Usually, an animate subject can "promote" an inanimate subject to take the same case marking, but some speakers seem to favour the other approach.

2. Demoted Subjects of Passives

The agent of a passive verb can be represented using a comitative-instrumental for animates, but takes acc + ips for inanimates.

3.Subjectless Verbs

There is a set of verbs that do not, normally, take (syntactical) subjects at all. These include nagan, slumber, imbur, be temporarily settled somewhere, urdrys, to grow, izgər, to breathe, uvis, to whistle (or 'there's noise from the wind'), mondyr, to listen to, anmir, (of ice on the sea), to melt. For all of these, an inanimate subject is acc + ips, an animate subject is comitative.

Some languages have an explicit copula. Some have some extent of zero-copulas. Some languages permit putting TAM-markers and person congruence on the complement, i.e.

However, an approach I've not seen much of - except maybe borderlinely so in English - is marking the subject for TAM and person, and have the complement unmarked for such things.

If this is attested (beyond clearly reduced copulas as in English), I'd be interested in knowing of it.

Some languages have an explicit copula. Some have some extent of zero-copulas. Some languages permit putting TAM-markers and person congruence on the complement, i.e.

However, an approach I've not seen much of - except maybe borderlinely so in English - is marking the subject for TAM and person, and have the complement unmarked for such things.

If this is attested (beyond clearly reduced copulas as in English), I'd be interested in knowing of it.

Some languages have an explicit copula. Some have some extent of zero-copulas. Some languages permit putting TAM-markers and person congruence on the complement, i.e.

However, an approach I've not seen much of - except maybe borderlinely so in English - is marking the subject for TAM and person, and have the complement unmarked for such things.

If this is attested (beyond clearly reduced copulas as in English), I'd be interested in knowing of it.