Syntax
I’m in the process of adding plenty of examples to this page. Various parts of the text may be rephrased, too, for increased clarity.
Despite my best efforts to organise this page in a straightforward and easy-to-follow manner, I shamefully admit it did end up as a massive clusterfuck of information slightly less organised than I wanted. I’ve tried to limit descriptions to bare necessities and all that, but there’s still a lot of text. I apologise in advance for probably having (accidentally) left out a lot of essential information.
In order to fully comprehend the content on this page, it is probably necessary to look through most of the other pages, especially verbs, nouns, adpositions and adjectives; and some prior knowledge in linguistic terms is more or less a requirement. I will not explain noun cases or adpositional detachment here, for example; nor will I explain what a noun phrase is.
For your convenience, I have summarised this entire page in just four words: Cenyani syntax is complicated.
- Contents
- 1 Noun phrases
- 2 Word order
- 2.1 Basic syntax
- 2.2 Specialised syntaxes
- 3 Exceptions
- 4 Negation
- 5 Compound nouns
Definitions
On this page, for the sake of simplicity, I have used certain terms for concepts that are relevant to determining the correct syntax of a Cenyani phrase, clause or sentence, defined thus:
- Subject (su):
- a noun phrase that is in the nominative case or functions as the actant; that is, the one who is doing whatever the verb describes.
- Direct object (do):
- a noun phrase that is in the accusative case.
- Indirect object (io):
- a noun phrase that is in the dative case.
- Expossessive object (eo):
- a noun phrase that is in the expossessive case – shockingly logical, I know.
- Adverbial (advl):
- an adverb, such as “soon” or “quickly”; or an adverbial phrase, such as a noun with an adposition – “in an hour” – or a subordinate clause – “when I’m done”.
Subjects, direct objects, indirect objects and expossessive objects will be collectively referred to as non-adverbials.
When a nominal noun phrase is said to be in a certain case, it means that the head is inflected to the case in question, and all applicable determiner(s), adjective(s) and modifier(s) must agree with this case.
For infinitive and predicate noun phrases, it usually means that there is a conjunction which reveals the clause’s purpose in the sentence – usually nö if it acts as a subject, or cö if it acts as a direct object. Conjunctions may sometimes be dropped from these noun phrases, as detailed below.
The term comma-delimited means that the phrase or expression must be preceded (unless it’s the very first thing in the sentence) and followed (unless it’s the very last thing in the sentence) by a comma. This is only relevant to the written form of the language and is not noticeable in speech. Unless you’re weird and actually say “comma” between clauses. Commas in the written Cenyani language do not encode pauses; they only act as separators.
Noun phrases
Noun phrases are probably the most important part of Cenyani syntax, since they do make up most of the content of any sentences you might construct in Cenyani. A noun phrase in Cenyani can be constructed around a noun, a nominalised/substantial adjective or a pronoun (called the head), or it can be an infinitive verb (not rarely with a subordinate clause following it), or an entire subordinate clause with a conjugated verb. I have chosen to call these three basic noun-phrase forms the nominal noun phrase, infinitive noun phrase and predicate noun phrase respectively.
- The nominal noun phrase follows this pattern: ‹determiner› ‹adjective(s)› ‹head› ‹modifier(s)›. Every component other than the head is optional; however, note that adjectives and determiners are typically not used if the head is a pronoun.
“Modifiers” are: nominal noun phrases with the head in the genitive, relative clauses, and attributive or descriptive noun phrases where the head has an adposition (e.g. “the man with the hat”). Inserting a relative clause before a genitive noun phrase – such as in “the loving father, whom I saw yesterday, of my boyfriend” – is considered ungrammatical in Cenyani only if the relative clause is restrictive.
Note that adjectives are not separated by commas, and that adjectives can be modified by adverbs (“amazingly big”), which are placed before the adjective. - The infinitive noun phrase consists of a verb-forward clause with the verb in the infinitive and without a subject. If an infinitive noun phrase acts as a subject and is at the very beginning or end of the sentence, it is not comma-delimited, nor does it have any preceding conjunction. If, however, it acts as a direct object (“I like to be hugged”), it must be comma-delimited and must be preceded by cö.
- The predicate noun phrase is very similar to the above: it, too, is a verb-forward clause, but it has a conjugated verb (one which is not in the infinitive) and a subject (unless it’s a passive voice formation). Predicate noun phrases also have to be comma-delimited at all times and must be preceded by a conjunction, either nö when it acts as a subject (“That he had travelled the world was well-known”) or cö when it acts as a direct object (“Everyone knew that he had travelled the world”).
A nominal noun phrase that consists of anything more than a bare noun, pronoun or nominalised/substantial adjective will be called a complex noun phrase, a term which also includes infinitive noun phrases and predicate noun phrases. This distinction is important in determining Cenyani syntax.
Infinitive and predicate noun phrases may additionally be used as adverbials, in which case conjunctions other than cö and nö are used. All conjunctions are always the first word in their clause.
List of conjunctions in the Cenyani dictionary.
Word order
Basic syntax
Cenyani has two basic word orders: the subject-forward order and the verb-forward order. They are pretty much exactly what the terms suggest; in the subject-forward order, the clause begins with the subject, whereas in the verb-forward order, the clause begins with the verb. Subject-forward and verb-forward clauses follow almost exactly the same pattern.
Subject-forward clauses look like this: ‹su› ‹verb› ‹io› ‹do› ‹eo› ‹advl(s)›. All components other than the subject and the verb are optional; though an indirect object is rarely included without a direct object, for example.
Verb-forward clauses are almost identical: ‹verb› ‹su› ‹io› ‹do› ‹eo› ‹advl(s)›.
Though it may seem as if Cenyani is very restrictive, the language does permit some freedom of movement. Any one component – and only one component – may be lifted to the front of the clause for focus, and the rest of the clause after that component must conform to the verb-forward order. Please do note, however, that the subject-forward order is not a special case of the verb-forward order; it is the default word order in independent indicative clauses (Cenyani is mostly SVO with some VSO flavouring).
When components are moved to the beginning of the sentence for focus, it is worth pointing out that adverbials that are connected or belong to the same logical category may be moved as a unit. “8:25 today” is technically two adverbials which could be independent – “8:25” and “today” – but which have been connected into a single unit; they both refer to a point in time (they’re both temporal adverbials) and they both complement each other.
Specialised syntaxes
A number of different contexts demand a slightly different word order, but, truth to be told, almost every single one of them boils down to the verb-forward pattern.
- Relative clauses
- always begin with the noun phrase that contains the relative pronoun, regardless of whether it’s an adverbial or a non-adverbial. The rest of the clause is verb-forward.
- Interrogative clauses
- are almost identical to relative clauses: they always begin with the noun phrase containing the interrogative word, and the rest of the clause is verb-forward; or, if there is no interrogative word (i.e. when asking about the truth of something; “Did you do it?” as opposed to “What did you do?”), the clause begins with the verb.
- If the interrogative word is inside a dependent clause that functions as a noun phrase (which may begin with the subordinating conjunction cö or nö), the entire clause is lifted to the beginning of the sentence, and the conjunction is often dropped. A sentence such as “Who did you say did it?” is interpreted as “(That) who did it, you said?”:
- Other dependent clauses
- are verb-forward as well. The only type of dependent clause that allows a tiny bit of flexibility is the conditional clause – “if [...]” – which always begins with yo = “if” and permits any non-complex non-adverbial component of the clause to be moved forward and placed between the yo and the verb.
“If I were bigger, I would eat his (pejorative) head! What an idiot!”
- Passive voice
- is approximated by simply removing the agent (actant) from an active-voice clause. The focus of a passive clause is usually the direct object (the one who was ‹verb›ed), so it is usually lifted to the front. The construct “x was verbed by y” has no direct equivalent in Cenyani; it would be expressed with the object in front of the verb, instead of the subject, thus putting focus on it.
- (Note: sas + dative is a fixed expression, meaning “to be called” or “to be addressed as/with”. The name, descriptive noun or adjective is in the nominative.)
Exceptions
There are a few cases where the rules described in the massive chunk of text above actually don’t entirely apply. That is to say, there are a few cases where the rules are slightly different.
Personal pronoun subject
The first of these exceptions is when the subject and direct object of an indicative clause are both personal pronouns. In that case, the subject ends up after the direct object, and then the rest of the clause follows. Unless the direct object is mir, in which case the clause behaves as all other clauses with personal-pronoun subjects do: verb-forward.
“I like eating meat at night.”
Components can, of course, be moved forward for focus even in these cases.
Long noun phrases
Another case where components may move around a bit is if the component is a very long noun phrase (or adverbial) with many adjectives or many modifiers or a combination thereof. In such a case, the component is sometimes moved to the very end of the clause. A sentence such as “I got a present from my mother that I really liked a lot” would be something like “Got I a present, which liked I really a lot, from my mother” in Cenyani, which is rather unwieldy to say; so, instead, the big direct object “a present, which I really liked a lot” is moved to the end of the sentence: “Got I from my mother a present, which liked I really a lot”.
Because of Cenyani’s strict grammatical case marking, the sentence becomes no more ambiguous when altered like this.
Modal auxiliary verbs
These correspond to English verbs such as “want (to)”, “must”, “can” and so on. In Cenyani, this special category of verbs almost always take an infinitive noun phrase as their only object (which is not optional), and that noun phrase is not comma-delimited, and does not start with cö unless the object is the first thing in the sentence. The infinitive noun phrase is always invariably verb-forward.
Verbs which behave in this manner in Cenyani are few, and they are all listed below.
The below list will be expanded eventually.
Negation
Negation in Cenyani is similar to English: in a clause, only one component may be negated.
Negation is performed either with the negating word ráo (“not”), or with any other word whose meaning is logically negating, such as rayin (“no one”) or rayum (“never”).
“Don’t travel only along the roads. None of the good prey [animals] are near them.”
The word ráo is always placed before the negated component, which is usually a verb, but can be any other component. It can even be used to negate single sub-components within a component: ráo rimac cenyum translates to “not the green dragon” (note the focus on rimac/green in both Cenyani and English).
Other negating words are placed according to normal syntax rules, depending, of course, on their part of speech and their usage in the clause.
Compound nouns
As with noun phrases with adjectives modifying the noun, compound nouns are head-final. This means the word aštutimi is a type of timi, and aštu(m) describes what type of timi it is.
Derivation contains more information on forming compound nouns.
There are some adjective–noun and noun–noun expressions which behave a bit like compound nouns without being written as one word, in that the first word is never declined. An example would be octo oceh which literally means something like “large foot” or “large stride”. It is used primarily in the expression rox octo ocehre, which is sometimes realised as rox octo ocehcöre, meaning “to move quickly”. Although the noun in the alternative version is in the accusative case, the adjective does not change (would be octoc otherwise). This is a largely nonproductive phenomenon.
