Learning about Grammar

One of the bigger mistakes you can make when creating a conlang is to come up with all new words that are totally different to English, only to accidentally replicate English grammar. If you’ve never studied linguistics, or learned a wide array of foreign languages (that’s most people!), then you probably don’t know just how differently other languages can structure their sentences. This crash course is designed to teach newcomers all the weird and wonderful things that you can add to you language.

This article assumes you don’t understand any technical linguistic jargon. You’ll learn along the way. You can always refer to the glossary of linguistic terms throughout the course. The only thing we’re going to assume you know are the basic parts-of-speech. So if you need a refresher on parts-of-speech, please click below:

Part-of-Speech definitions

• A noun is a thing that you can touch, like dog or car. It can also be an abstract idea, like justice. The test for whether something is a noun is whether you can add articles such as “the” or “a” before it: the belief and a belief are grammatically correct, but the believe and a believe are not.
• An adjective describes a noun, such as “the happy dog”. The test for adjectives is that they can go between an article (“the” or “a”) and noun, but cannot come after articles on thier own, e.g. a happy.
• A verb is a doing word, like walk or sing. One test for verbs is whether they can be made into past or future tense: walked/sang and will walk/will sing
• A determiner is a word that comes before a noun and describes different types of “reference” to the noun. There are a couple of types of determiners: articles (the, a) describe whether a noun has already been referred to; demonstratives (this, that) denote a different referential distance from the speaker; possessive determiners (my, their) reference differences of possession; and quantifiers (many, both) reference differenes in quantity. The test for determiners is whether they can be replaced by other determiners. For example “my hand” can be replaced as “the hand” and “this hand”.
• A pronoun is a word such as I, you, he, she, it, we and they. Pronouns are defined by their ability to substitute for a noun (or noun phrase) in a sentence. For example, the sentence “dogs chased the small girl”, the noun “dogs” could be replaced with “they”. Furthermore, the noun phrase “the small girl” could be replaced with “her”.
• A preposition are words such as in, on, under, to, behind, which express spatial or temporal relations to a noun phrase. E.g. “He sat on the chair”.
• A particle is a word that only expresses a grammatical meaning and does not belong to any of the other parts-of-speech. The infinitive “to” is an example of an English particle, as in “to walk”.

What is grammar?

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Grammar refers to how a language structures its sentences and words. This involves both the word order of the language (known as syntax) and how the words themselves change to express different things (known as inflection). Consider the fact that in English we say “I walk” and not “walk I”. That’s syntax. And consider how walk changes in past tense: walk → walked. That’s inflection.

You might have heard that grammar is concerned with things like punctuation (when to use “its” vs “it’s”) and spelling (when to use “their” vs “there”). In truth, this has more to do with writing conventions. For the purposes of linguistics, “grammar” refers to the rules of the spoken language, that which comes naturally to all native speakers, regardless of whether they can even read or write. It’s more about whether the spoken language puts the adjective before the noun — in English we say “deadly woman” — or after the noun — as in French “femme fatale”. Or whether you have to use different forms of “the” based on the gender of the noun: “la femme” vs “le garcon” (the boy).

Topic 1: Word Order

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When someone tells you “the dog chased the cat”, it’s tempting to think that the reason the words are said in this order is because that is the natural chain of events that happen when a dog chases a cat. The dog initiates the chase, and moves towards its target. Dog. Chase. Cat. It may be tempting to think, therefore, that this is the natural order in which the words come to mind when we think about the event. However this may not be the case. Many languages will express this sentence in different orders.

The most common way that languages around the world express this sentence is as “the dog the cat chased”. This is called Subject-Object-Verb order: subject is a term used for the doer of the verb (the dog) and the object is the thing the verb is done to (the cat). This order is common in many Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean, and the languages of India.

English’s Subject-Verb-Object order is the second most common order. This is the order of most European languages. Next most common is Verb-Subject-Object “chase the dog the cat”. Arabic and Tagalog are examples of this. Word orders where the object comes before the subject (VOS, OVS and OSV) are far less common, though they do exist in some Native American, Southeast-Asian and Australian Aboriginal languages. So, it appears that there is at least some predilection for putting the doer of the verb before the thing that the verb is done to. Perhaps if you want your conlang to be unusual you could make the object come before the subject.

A final category is languages where various orders are possible, such as Modern Greek. This is called free word order. Free word order languages usually have some other mechanism of indicating who is the subject and object, such as add affixes to the nouns. Below is an example where the subject takes the suffix -a and the object takes the suffix -o. Who’s chasing who?

That’s right, the cat chased the dog! Linguists call these kinds of affixes case markings. The case for the subject is called the nominative case, and the case for the object is called the accusative case. Ok, now we’re really diving into some technical linguistic jargon! Why didn’t linguists just call this the subject case and the object case? Well, there is a reason for that, but we’re going to talk way more about this in the case section.

Some languages have a dominant word order but still mark nouns with case markings. Russian and Polish are examples of this. Both are SVO, like English. However, some level of movement is possible (for example, deviating from the dominant order may be used to add emphasis to different parts of the sentence).

Adjective and Noun order

Adjectives can either come before or after the noun. The majority of languages put it after the noun. We see this in the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Less than a third of languages put the adjective before the noun, such as English. In rarer cases, some languages have no dominant order.

Determiner and Noun order

Determiners are a word class that includes articles (the, a), demonstratives (this, that), possessive determiners (my, their) and other quantifiers (many, both). In English, determiners come before the adjective and noun, but other languages put it after. When combined with the adjective order, we get four possible orders for noun phrases:

• the black cat
• the cat black
• cat black the
• black cat the

Prepositions vs postpositions

Prepositions precede the noun phrase “He went to the city”. However, about half of the world’s languages place the preposition after the noun as in “He went the city to“, in which case they are called postpositions!

Topic 2: Grammatical Inflection

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Grammatical Inflection refers to how words change to express different grammatical concepts. An example of inflection in English is plurals being formed by adding an -s to a noun. Some other examples of inflection in English are:

• Past tense for verbs: walk → walked
• Continuous aspect on verbs: walk → walking
• Comparative and superlative adjectives: great → greater → greatest

All of English’s inflectional affixes are suffixes. A suffix is when you add something to end of a word. If it’s added to the beginning of the word, it’s called a prefix. For example, the Cherokee language uses prefixes to pluralize nouns:

• ugidatli (a feather) → tsugidatli (feathers)
• uwetsi (an egg) → tsuwetsi (eggs)
• ulisuwida (a color) → tsulisuwida (colors)

When we look at languages around the world, suffixes are the more common strategy for grammatical inflection, but prefixes are common too. If you’re looking for something a little less common, a circumfix is an affix that places something at both the beginning and end of a word. In Indonesian, the word naik means to “climb”, but only when there is no object in the sentence. Therefore, “I climb” is saya naik. But if I’m climbing something (an object) you have to use menaikkan: saya menaikkan gunung “I climb the mountain”.

Infixes are affixes that go somewhere inside the base word. It is often pointed out that English is able to infix expletive words, such as in absolutely → absofuckinglutely and unbelievable → unbefuckinglievable . However, infixing is fairly uncommon for expressing grammatical properties, and when languages do do it, they usually don’t express a wide array of different properties.

Inflection can also be expressed as a sound change to the word. We see this in English in a lot of irregular past tense verbs (sing → sang) and some irregular plural nouns (man → men).

On a related note, any grammatical property that can be expressed as inflection could also be expressed as a stand alone word. For example, past tense could be expressed a single word that comes elsewhere in the sentence, not attached to the verb at all. These are known as particle words. However, as particles are not technically inflection, we cover them in them in the later in this article.

Gluing affixes together vs. fusing affixes together

Usually, a single affix expresses a single grammatical concept. For example, the verb suffix -ed only expresses past tense, nothing else. Some languages add multiple grammatical affixes in a row to a single word. This is called agglutinative inflection (think “glued” together). Turkish does this. To form verbs in Turkish, you must first add a tense suffix and then a person affix to denote who is doing the verb (i.e. I, you, he, she, we, they, or some other noun). “You like” translates to seversin, which breaks out as:

sev	-er	-sin
like	-ᴘʀᴇꜱᴇɴᴛ	-you

Whereas “we liked” is sevdiniz:

sev	-di	-niz
like	-ᴘᴀꜱᴛ	-we

Other languages may express multiple concepts in a single affix. This is called fusional inflection. For example, in Italian, noun suffixes express both the number (singular vs plural) and the gender (masculine vs feminine):

	Singular	Plural
Masculine	ragazzo boy	ragazzi boys
Feminine	ragazza girl	ragazze girls

Agreement

Sometimes grammatical inflection doesn’t technically add any new information to a sentence, if the information is stated elsewhere in the sentence. For example, English adds an -s to verbs for 3rd person in the present tense:

he walks

vs

you walk

However, note that this suffix doesn’t really provide any new information. The use of the 3rd person pronoun (he) already makes it self-evident that the verb is being done by a 3rd person. And in theory, “he walk” ought to be all the information needed to convey the sentence grammatically. Nonetheless, the rules of English dictate that “he walk” is simply not correct, and that “he walks” is. This is called grammatical agreement; the affix “agrees” that the verb is being done by a 3rd person, rather than adding new information.

The reason a language develops any form of agreement is mostly a quirk of its historical evolution. In the case of this particular suffix, English evolved from an ancient language which used suffixes on verbs to indicate who the subject was. This allowed them to not use pronouns at all, as the pronoun was effectively on the end of the verb. Then, at some point later, for whatever reason, speakers decided to start using pronouns again, and gradually stop using the suffixes. But they clearly never got around to dropping the 3rd person present suffix! Therefore, the existence of agreement can be seen as a kind of halfway point between speakers deciding to change where information goes in a sentence. Adding agreement may be a good way to add some sort of messy realism to your conlang in this regard.

While English has only one regular verb affix for agreement, some other languages have a lot more. Turkish actually has agreement between all six pronouns and the verb:

I like	ben severim
you like	sen seversin
he/she/it likes	o sever
we like	biz severiz
you (plural) like	siz seversiniz
they like	onlar severler

It’s common to have agreement between pronouns/nouns and verbs. It’s also common between nouns and determiners. For instance, English shows agreement for number (singular vs plural) on demonstratives: this dog vs those dogs. And Italian shows agreement not only between articles and noun, but also adjectives:

	Singular	Plural
Masculine	il ragazzo rumoroso the loud boy	i ragazzi rumorosi the loud boys
Feminine	la ragazza rumorosa the loud girl	le ragazze rumorose the loud girls

Word-level affixes vs phrase-level affixes

Usually, an affix attaches to a particular part-of-speech. The English past tense suffix -ed can only attach to verbs; it cannot attach to a noun, adjective, or determiner. However, consider what is happening with the English possessive -s in the following examples:

1. the president’s daughter
2. the president of Spain’s daughter
3. the president who resigned’s daughter

In all three examples, the sentence refers to the daughter of a president. However, in the second example the possessive suffix attaches to “Spain”, and in the third example it actually attaches to a verb. So clearly, the rule here is not that the possessive suffix necessarily attaches to the noun doing the possessing. Rather, “of Spain” and “who resigned” further specify which president is being referred to, and the possessive attaches to the end of that whole phrase.

That whole phrase, by the way, is a noun phrase. We’ve briefly mentioned noun phrases already, but what exactly are they? I like to think of them as: all the words that describe the full thing doing the main verb of the sentence. Therefore, all the following highlighted parts are noun phrases:

1. the president spoke
2. the new president spoke
3. the new president who believed in the rule of law spoke
4. the new president who believed in the rule of law who I met on the King’s plane coming back from Uganda spoke

Note that noun phrases can be embedded inside larger noun phrases. All the following bold and underlined parts are noun phrases themselves: the new president who believed in the rule of law who I met on the King‘s plane coming back from Uganda.

This kind of phrase-level affixation is another feature you could add to you your language. We could imagine a language that marks the nominative phrase with a suffix -n and the accusative phrase with a prefix a-, which would give us sentences that function like this:

• my wifen ate alunch
• my wife who I loven ate aher lunch

Phrase-level affixes such as these are a kind of clitic. Clitics act like words by moving around based on the broader sentence structure, but also act like affixes by attaching themselves to another word. Another examples of a clitic is the contracted form of “is”:

• The girl is here → The girl’s here
• The girl you like is here → The girl you like’s here

Topic 3: Grammatical words

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Certain kinds of words can be said to be “grammatical” words as opposed to “content” words. Grammatical words (also known as function words) include things like pronouns (I, you, he, she, etc), articles (the, a) and other determiners (this, that). Grammatical words have little lexical meaning and mainly express grammatical concepts. They said to be a closed-class of words, which means new words are rarely added to these word classes. By contrast, nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are content words. Content words have clear lexical meanings and are open classes (new content words are often created).

Articles

Articles in English include the words the and a. Any English speaker knows perfectly well how to use articles, though some may struggle to actually define their meaning without using a circular definition. I have seen people try to define the as “it refers to the thing. Like, the…”

So how are they defined? One observation of articles is that they make a distinction as to whether the noun has already been referred to or not. For instance, I could say “I saw a car yesterday. The car was carrying a trailer. The trailer had a dog in it. The dog wore a collar…” Each new noun is first identified with a, and any subsequent mentions of the noun uses the, signalling that it was identified earlier. Linguists call this level of identifiability definiteness: something already identified is definite, and something not already identified is indefinite.

Articles are a feature in many European languages. However, many of the world’s major languages do not have articles at all! This includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many other languages on the Asian continent. For English speakers, not using articles might feel unnatural. However, once you learn a language without articles you quickly realise how unnecessary they really are. The following sentence still conveys all the information perfectly fine without articles: “I saw car yesterday. Car was carrying trailer. Trailer had dog in it…”

When languages don’t have articles, they usually still have optional words that can more or less convey what articles convey. For instance, Indonesian does not have articles, but it does have words for “this” ini, and “that” itu. These words effectively convey what “the” would, except they are optional. Articles, on the other hand, are required.

For languages that do have articles, there’s a couple of different way they can manifest. Some languages have a definite article but not an indefinite article. The Irish language has a definite article an, but expresses indefiniteness by just saying the noun on its own:

Definite	an madra the dog
Indefinite	madra a dog

Articles may be expressed as affixes, as opposed to being separate words. Icelandic uses the suffix -inn for definite, and also has no indefinite marking:

Definite	hundurinn the dog
Indefinite	hundur a dog

By definition, articles always express definiteness. They may also express number, gender or case. As we have already seen, Italian articles agree with the number and gender of the noun. Articles may express critical information number/gender/case information that the noun does not. In spoken French, the plural definite article les is what indicates that a noun is plural; the noun itself does not express plurality in the spoken form (the plural may be spelled with an -s suffix, but this letter is usually silent). Similarly, German expresses certain cases in articles, but not on its nouns.

Demonstratives

Demonstratives are words such as “this” and “that”. They are used to contrast which thing is being referred to based on its physical location to the speaker.

English demonstratives, like most languages, have a two-way distinction between things that are close (“this”) and things that are further away (“that”). These are called proximal and distal demonstratives, respectively. Some languages have a three-way distinction by adding a medial demonstrative for things somewhere between proximal and distal (e.g. Japanese). Alternatively, the medial demonstrative may refer to something near to the person being spoken to, with the distal referring to something far away from both speaker and listener (e.g. Hawaiian).

Like articles, demonstratives may also express number, gender or case. For example, English demonstratives have number: singular “this” vs plural “these”.

Demonstratives are not technically a part-of-speech themselves; they are either determiners or pronouns, depending on how they are used in the sentence. For example, they are determiners when they work with a noun phrase, such as “I like this blue car as opposed to that blue car“. They function as pronouns when they replace the whole noun phrase, e.g.: “I like this as opposed to that“.

The determiner and pronoun forms are usually the same word, as in English, although sometimes they are different, as in French:

• Elle aime ce livre – “She likes this book”
• Elle aime ça – “She likes this“

Personal pronouns

Personal pronouns express a difference between grammatical person, e.g.: 1st person (I, me) 2nd person (you) and 3rd person (he, him). It’s highly common for languages to also distinguish number (singular vs plural) in personal pronouns. This means that languages usually have a minimum of six personal pronouns, correlating to: I, you, he, we, you (plural), and they.

English does not have the minimum six pronouns, because it expresses a three-way gender distinction in the 3rd person singular: “he”, “she” and “it”. Other languages express gender in other persons. For example, in addition to having a gender distinction for “he” and “she”, Romanian has a distinction between “they” referring to a group of all males, and referring to a group of all females (mixed-gender groups take the masculine form):

	Singular	Plural
Masculine	el he	ei they (masculine)
Feminine	ea she	ele they (feminine)

Although less common, Gender distinctions are possible in the 1st and 2nd person too. Some examples of this are:

• Thai has a masculine and feminine form for “I”
• Hebrew has a masculine and feminine form for “you”
• Vietnamese has different forms of “I” for when a man is speaking to a woman vs when a woman is speaking to a man

And of course, like other kinds of grammatical words, pronouns can also express grammatical case. In English, pronouns are actually the only place case is still expressed (a holdover from Old English). This is the difference between I/he/she/they (nominative case) and me/him/her/them (accusative case).

Formality is another common feature in pronouns. For those of you who have learnt any Spanish, you may know that the word for “you” is tú. But if you want to show a sign of respect to someone (your boss, an elder, etc.) you might use usted. It’s relatively common for languages to have formality in the 2nd person. Formality levels for 1st person and 3rd person are possible too, as are varying levels of formality. Japanese is notorious for having many different pronouns for different contexts: very formal pronouns used to address government officials only, formal for other contexts (e.g. teachers), informal with friends, and down right rude pronouns.

Some languages have two different versions of the 2nd person plural pronoun, “we”, that refers to either “me and you” or “me, some other people, but not you”. This is called clusivity — inclusive and exclusive, respectively. For example, Indonesian has kita to include the person being spoken to and kami to exclude them.

Non-personal pronouns

There are a handful of non-personal pronouns that you may not have realised are technically pronouns. As already mentioned, demonstratives are sometimes pronouns. Another major type is interrogative pronouns which are used to ask questions, such as “who”, “what” and “which”. Interrogative pronouns effectively replace the noun phrase that is the answer to the question, e.g.:

• Question: “Who ate Jane’s homework?”
• Answer: “The dog ate Jane’s homework”

“Who”, “what”, “which” and “that” can also function as relative pronouns. Relative pronouns refer back to the noun immediately before it in a relative clause. For example, “The man who lives by the sea.” Here, who doesn’t form a question, it refers to “the man”.

Finally, there are a handful of so-called indefinite pronouns which refer to an unspecified person or thing. For people: “someone”, “anyone”, “no-one”. And for things: “something”, “anything”, “nothing”.

All of these are pronouns because they all replace a noun or noun phrase in some way. Like personal pronouns, all of these pronouns can also have number, gender and case.

Possessives

Possessive determiners are words such as my, your, his, her, our and their. These are often mislabelled as “possessive pronouns”. However, they are not technically pronouns, because they never replace a noun phrase. For example, “my” must always be used with a noun, as “that is my car“. Meanwhile, the word “mine” can replace the noun phrase, e.g. “That is mine“. Therefore, “mine” is what’s actually a possessive pronoun. The following words are the possessive pronouns that pair with possessive determiners:

Determiner	Pronoun
my	mine
your	yours
his	his
her	hers
it	its
our	ours
their	theirs

Possessive determiners are a particularly European feature. Many of the rest of the world’s languages use affixes instead of determiners, for example Somali:

• koofiyadayda – “my hat”
• koofiyadaada – “your hat”
• koofiyaddiisa – “his hat”

The other kind of possession is when a noun does the possessing, e.g. “the dog’s bone”. Note that English puts the possessive marker ‘s on the thing doing the possessing (the dog). Some other languages put the possession marker on the thing being possessed (the bone). Other languages place a possession marker on both the dog and the bone. Some languages do not mark for possession at all, e.g. in Vietnamese they just say literally “dog bone” xương chó. Nice and simple!

Particles

Particles are words that solely express a grammatical property, without having any real lexical meaning on their own, but that don’t fit into the definitions of any other parts-of-speech. For example, the Māori language in New Zealand uses particles to express tense:

• i haere au – “I went”
• ka haere au – “I will go”

Like affixes, any grammatical property can be expressed as a particle. Additionally, particles themselves can’t be inflected. In that sense, particles are sort of like affixes that are simply detached from the word. Because they are not attached to a word, particles have their own word order rules.