Overall Typology

Space and Time

Spatial deixis in Keneak obligatorily distinguishes time as well as space; there are separate deictics for describing the location of something relative to the speaker's past location, and for indicating that an event occurred "here" in the past. For present-time spatial deixis, there is a four-way distinction:

• within arm's reach of the speaker
• out of reach but within sight
• nearby but visually obscured
• distant, out-of-sight

There are demonstrative pronouns (analogous to this, that) but demonstrative adjectives are conflated with the adverbs corresponding to here and there—effectively, to say this house you'd say "the house here".

Metaphors of time use an inside-outside dichotomy to map time onto space. While English speakers conceptualize the future as being ahead or to the right, Keneak speakers think of the future as being "outside" and the past as being "inside". Outside or inside what isn't so clear, but it likely has some relation to Keneak concepts of experiential liminality—the boundary between experience and non-experience. Speaking of which...

Experiential liminality plays a large role in determining which of Keneak's two tenses is used for a clause, although it's by no means the only factor. The two tenses, termed proximal and distal, can be used to distinguish present from nonpresent events, nearby events from faraway ones, events within the experience of the interlocutors from those outside their experience, and immediately relevant events from less relevant ones.

Logic

Keneak eschews binary logic in favor of a four-way opposition: there are words corresponding roughly to "yes/true", "no/false", "proposition makes unfounded assumptions", and "proposition is unfalsifiable". Some examples of statements that fit these truth values:

• This sentence is in English. (true)
• This sentence is in French. (false)
• The King of France is bald. (unfounded assumption—as of this writing, there is no King of France)
• This computer program will eventually halt. (in general, unfalsifiable)

Lexicon

Consonants

Voiceless stops typically voice after a vowel, except in clusters. Ejectives become pulmonic voiceless stops syllable-finally. /h/ becomes [x] after a vowel.

Between two vowels of differing backness, certain consonants become velarized (after a back vowel) or palatalized (after a front vowel). t, b, k, v, m, n, l can all be affected by velarization and palatalization. Labial consonants acquire a labial offglide in addition to being velarized.

/l/ is alveolar after /u/.

Vowels

/ɔ/ becomes [a] in a syllable following /i/, before /j/, and word-finally. /ɔ/ becomes [ɒ] in a syllable following /ɛ/. /ɔ/ is less rounded in monosyllables.

The sequence ia is realized /æ/ in stressed syllables, and /i.a/ elsewhere.

Before r, /ɔ/ and /ɛ/ are raised to /o/ and /e/.

Vowels are usually nasalized before a nasal consonant. Vowel nasalization begins about midway through the duration of the vowel.

The sequence ka is usually realized [kʷa].

Keneak's distribution of vowels is notably skewed. The mid vowels are about 5 times more common than the high vowels. The most common vowel, /ɛ/, is about ten times more frequent than the least common vowel, /u/.

Phonotactics

The formula for a syllable is (fricative) (C) (approximant) V (fricative or nasal) (C).

The palatal stop d may only appear intervocallically.

Stress and Timing

Stress is penultimate if the penultimate syllable is closed; otherwise, the antepenult is stressed.

Keneak is stress-timed.

Number

Nouns are inflected for six numbers:

• General (unmarked)
• Singular, suffix -(e)c
• Dual, suffix -yat
• Partitive, suffix -yen
• Plural, suffix -rim
• Class Plural, suffix -ran

The general number is unspecific as to the actual number of the referent; it could be singular or plural. The dual is used only for pairs of things—for two unrelated items, you'd use the numeral tat "two". The partitive is used when picking out a subset of items from a larger group; it basically corresponds to the English construction some of the Xs. The class plural is used for talking about all instances of a type of thing, and most often used when expressing generalizations: mlavrath vexta mato "sheep eat grass".

Pronouns

Number affixes can be added to almost all the nonsingular forms; the only irregular form is jath "all of them".

The first-person plural pronouns make an inclusive-exclusive distinction—xel is used when you are included in we; otherwise, xem is used.

The use of the familiar 2nd-person pronoun is highly restricted: it's used only with one's immediate family, spouse or lover, and very close friends. A general rule of thumb is only to use it with people you've lived with for a long time, although there are exceptions. Use of the familiar pronoun is generally avoided when in the presence of people with whom you'd use the normal second-person pronoun, even if you're not speaking to them. Because of this highly restricted usage, the regular 2nd-person singular form has no connotations of formality. It's simply the only option available in many situations.

All the 3rd-person pronouns in the above table are usually used to refer to animate beings, although the generic and plural forms are sometimes used of inanimates when it's important to specify number for some reason. It's much more common for inanimates to be referred to with their class pronoun, but the class pronouns are so numerous that there's a separate section in this grammar for them.

The impersonal pronoun is used for talking about an unspecified or typical person, similar to the way we use one or the rhetorical you in English.

Nominal Modifiers

The formula for a noun phrase is:

NP → (possessive) N (numeral) ADJ* PP* [relative clause]*

That is, a noun phrase consists of an optional possessive, followed by the noun, followed by an optional numeral, zero or more adjectives, zero or more prepositional phrases, and zero or more relative clauses.

Coverage of relative clauses will be left for later, since knowledge of how sentences are put together is necessary to understand their internal mechanics. However, all the other modifier types will be dealt with in this section. The use of numerals has already been covered; if you didn't read that section you can go back to it via the miracle of hypertext.

Nominative and Causative Case

Nouns inflect for two cases: nominative and causative. The nominative case is the default, unmarked case for nouns.

The causative case is formed by suffixing -ok to the nominative form. The use of the causative is covered in the section on syntax; for now, note that causatives precede other verb arguments, and don't fill the verb's valence slots.

Noun Classes

This list is (very) incomplete.

Pointers

Dynamic Verbs

A dynamic verb may be marked as inchoative or cessative, indicating that the verb's participant is entering or leaving the indicated state. Inchoative verbs are immediately followed by n, which is pronounced as part of the final syllable of the verb but allows raising to affect the verb's final vowel. Cessative verbs are similarly followed by c. The inchoative and cessative particles are bound morphemes, but are written as separate words for the aforementioned phonetic reason.

Verbs of tranformation, which express that one object turns into another, are dynamic and take a following nominal complement.

Factive verbs, which describe the creation of something, are dynamic and inchoative. They often take an additional complement in causative case to indicate the agent. The complement that follows the verb is always a pronoun that agrees in class with the thing being created.

If a factive verb is used transitively, it suggests that the process of creation was not completed.

The Dummy Verb n-

The verb n- is used when a dynamic verb is syntactically required (due to the verb participant undergoing an explicit state change) but a semantically meaningful verb is not necessary to convey the speaker's intended meaning because the state itself carries all the semantic weight. The dummy verb is similar to a copula, but is also used to express changes of state.

The dummy verb can be dropped in a main clause if it is non-volitional and neither inchoative nor cessative. However, it cannot be dropped in an embedded clause.

Aspect

Verbs can be inflected for several aspects. All the aspects are marked by suffixes added after the volitionality/dynamicity/transitivity suffix.

The most common aspect suffix is -ni, which marks the perfect aspect.

Clause Structure

Sentences in Keneak are built on the following plan:

S → (NP) (TME-particle) NP* AUX* V (NP|MOD) ADV* PP*

That is, a sentence consists of an optional topic noun phrase, an optional particle that marks tense, mood, and evidentiality, zero or more argument noun phrases, zero or more auxiliary verbs, the main verb, an optional noun phrase or modifier phrase following the verb, zero or more adverbs, and zero or more prepositional phrases.

The important part is, of course, how each of these pieces contributes to the meaning of the sentence, which will hopefully become clear in the following sections.

Relative Clauses

Relative clauses are always the last of a noun phrase's modifiers in Keneak, although it may be useful to think of them as not part of the noun phrase at all, since they can stand as sentences in their own right, and other material (such as the verb of the main clause) can intercede between the noun phrase and the relative clause. Relative clauses always use resumptive pronouns that agree with the noun the clause is modifying. In English, resumptive pronouns are seldom used, but they do occur: "These are the guys who you wanted to know where they found the spaceship parts", not *"These are the guys who you wanted to know where found the spaceship parts". In Keneak, resumptive pronouns are required in every relative clause. It's as if you had to say "This is the man who he came to dinner" rather than "This is the man who came to dinner".

The proximal and distal tenses have a specialized use in relative clauses: rather than specifying the relevance of or spatio-temporal distance to an event, they mark a relative clause as being either specifying or modifying. A specifying relative clause is one that is used because the listener would not be able to identify the referent of the noun phrase without it. A modifying relative clause is one that merely adds descriptive detail to a noun phrase, and doesn't help the listener identify its referent. Another way to think about it is that modifying relative clauses convey new information about the noun phrase's referent that the listener doesn't yet know, while a specifying relative clause contains "old news".

English actually makes a distinction between specifying and modifying relative clauses in some instances, although prosodically rather than morphologically. A pause before a relative clause can indicate that it is being used as a modifier rather than a specifier:

In the first example, the woman in question has not been talked about before, or perhaps there are several women in the scene and the speaker is using the relative clause to single out a particular one to talk about. In the second example, the listener is assumed to know who is being talked about, and the relative clause just adds a descriptive detail.

In Keneak, the proximal tense marker an indicates that a relative clause is acting as a specifier, and the distal tense marker ve indicates that it is a modifier.

The Use of Infinitives

Infinitives are vital to many idiomatic constructions in Keneak that rely on conceptualizing actions and events as entities. Keneak tends to think of infinitives as function objects—entities that encapsulate a type of action and perhaps one or more of its participants as well, and which can be "invoked" by supplying any missing arguments (if that doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry; it's a computer science metaphor, and a pretty fuzzy one at that).

The verb sal- "to know" illustrates that constructions with infinitives are often idiomatic. When a finite clause is the object of sal-, it simply means "know" in the sense of "know that a proposition is true". However, when an infinitive with a missing argument is used instead, it means "know how".

Not all verbs that can take infinitive clauses as objects can also take finite clauses. For instance, mer- "want" can only be used with infinitives.

Connected Clauses

Keneak has a set of connectives, particles that act like clause-level conjunctions. They express relationships between events or propositions that aren't covered by the major moods.

The connective yot emphasizes a contrast between two clauses or sentences:

There are several connectives that indicate temporal relationships between events. For indicates that a process lasts until some event occurs.

Dway is kind of like a mirror-image of for—it indicates that some process begins when some event occurs, and continues for an unspecified length of time. English would usually use "when" where Keneak uses dway.

Implicatures and Entailments of Numerals and Quantifiers

The entailments of numeral modifiers are different in Keneak than in English. In English, if somebody says there are three people in the house, it is implied that there are only three people in the house, but it is not a contradiction to say there are three people in the house; in fact, there are four people in the house. In Keneak, however, use of a bare numeral entails that there is no higher numeral that could be used to describe the situation. That is, it would be a contradiction to say the equivalent of there are three people in the house; in fact, there are four people in the house. English has a similar entailment for the numeral zero: in both English and Keneak, it's a contradiction to say there are zero people in the house; in fact, there is one person in the house, just as it's contradictory to say there is no one in the house; in fact, there is someone in the house.

English and Keneak also differ in the implicatures and entailments of their "universal quantifiers"—I put the phrase in quotes because Keneak arguably has no true universal quantifiers. The reason for this is precisely a matter of different entailments between the two languages. In English, it is a contradiction to say All sheep eat grass. This sheep does not eat grass. The use of "all" entails that there is no counterexample. But the equivalent sentence in Keneak, using the class plural -rath to express the meaning "all", does not have the same entailment; it merely implies that there is no counterexample.

Derivational Morphology

Usage Examples of Selected Words