gwalla ([info]gwalla) wrote in [info]conlangs,
@ 2008-02-15 20:06:00
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Mood musing
How do you all deal with mood and modality in your conlangs?

One of my projects combines a tripartite indicative/subjunctive/imperative verbal mood inflection system with a set of modal auxiliary verbs (incorporating evidential features). I was wondering if there are any other interesting systems out there in conlangerland.

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[info]scotrid
2008-02-16 08:11 am UTC (link)
I treat imperative as a tense, since it doesn't need to be combined with one. My tense dimension goes infinitive, past, present, future, imperative.

I'm trying to do without subjunctive. An if-then statement like "If I had enough money I would buy a new car," takes the form "I won't buy a new car, because I don't have enough money," or "I don't have enough money, so I won't buy a new car." The conditional replaces "not" with an adverb that means "might", as "I might have enough money, so I might buy a new car."

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[info]zrzuce
2008-02-16 01:41 pm UTC (link)
My conlang, the indicative mood is the default mood. Word order does not matter, and subjects can be omitted. However, the subjunctive is indicated by the marker u and the required placement of the verb's subject immediately following u. In addition, a strict subjunctive word order dictates that the subjunctive phrase must occur at the beginning of the sentence.

Example:

Sqiói zje labrà iqě.
I know that he works here.

U li labrà iqě, nae sqiói.
I don't know that [if] he works here.

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[info]zrzuce
2008-02-16 01:44 pm UTC (link)
Also, imperatives are indicated by taking the second person singular form of a verb, which is accented on the first syllable, and shifting the accentuation to the second syllable. To indicate greater urgency, the suffix, tá can be added.

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[info]stormteller
2008-02-16 09:12 pm UTC (link)
One of my current major conlang projects, Varaton, verb morphology is mostly handled through the placement of certain infixes. There are four places where these can go, each with a specific purpose: there are prefixes, which are used for tense; infixes, which are generally used for mood (with some exceptions), suffixes, which generally indicate verbal voices (with some exceptions), and finally plurality markers, which create agreement between verbs and subject nouns and always go between any ordinary infixes and suffixes that might be present.

Moods that can be assigned in this way include: indicative (default), benefactive (infix), interrogative (infix), imperative (infix), infinitive (infix), optative (suffix), emphatic (suffix), and performative (suffix).
Because there can only be one fix for each place, if you want to mix purposes and create, for example, a benefactive infinitive verb, you would have to accomplish that through either adpositions or a grammatical structure, in this case by using the benefactive postposition [ta].

Negative moods are formed with the use of a negative postpositional particle, [nam], which can also be used to negate adjectives, adverbs and nouns.

Moods such as the subjunctive are formed through adpositions, and occasionally through grammatical structures.

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[info]ubykhlives
2008-02-29 04:42 am UTC (link)
In my conlang, Ertazh Kønen, most moods and evidential meanings are dealt with by particles (for instance, the optative čanan ixilin nahal John saw me, čanan ixilin xeč nahal would that John had seen me), but there's no distinct subjunctive.

As for the imperative, what I've done with that is simply to make the imperative a morphologically stripped form. Ertazh verbs carry agreement for person and noun class of the subject in the indicative, but to make an imperative, the sbuject class-marking is dropped: nayek you (masculine) did it, layek you (feminine) did it, ayek do it!.

Is your conlang synthetic, or analytic?

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