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Index
Contents
Introduction
For the impatient
Using this book
Overall structure
But how do I start?
Don’t read this sentence!
What’s it for?
Typographical conventions
Your brilliant conlanging career
Web resources
Acknowledgements
A naming language
A mini-grammar
Hints for naming languages
The overall process
Sounds
Lexicon
Inflections
Derivations
Syntax
Goodies
Alphabet
Feedback
Models
Natural and unnatural languages
Non-Western (or at least non-English) models
Am I done yet?
Sounds
Phonetic notation
Consonants
Place of articulation
Degree of closure
More distinctions
Voicing
Nasalization
Aspiration
Palatalization
Labialization
Glottal games
The consonant grid
Rhotics
Laterals
Phones, phonemes, and allophones
Phonemes vs. letters
Phonemes vs. allophones
Allophones vs. dialectal realizations
Phonemic analysis
Cross-language comparisons
Inventing consonants
Vowels
Height
Frontness
The vowel grid
Tenseness
Roundedness
Other distinctions
Diphthongs
Vowel systems
What makes an good phonetic inventory?
Stress
Tone
Tone proper
Pitch-accent systems
Channels
Phonological constraints
Working backwards
Assimilation
Alien mouths
Orthography
Multiple transliterations
Diacritics
Writing systems
Acoustic phonetics
Word building
How many words do you need?
Alien or a priori languages
A few half-recognizable borrowings
Borrowing existing lexicons
Sound symbolism
Derivational morphology
On not reinventing English
Grammar
Morphology and syntax
How to use this chapter
Grammaticalization
Fusional, agglutinative, isolating?
Got nouns, verbs, and adjectives?
What noun inflections are there?
Case
Case particles
Ergativity
Novel case systems
Head marking
Gender
What is gender for?
Is gender sexist?
Other possibilities for nouns
Mass and count nouns
What verb inflections are there?
Person and number
Bipersonal inflection
Tense and aspect
Tense
Aspect
Interactions
Irrealis forms
Other possibilities for verbs
I’m here for an argument
What are the personal pronouns?
Other forms
Do subject pronouns appear?
Are pronouns necessary?
What are the other pronouns?
Make your language count
Derivations
What about adjectives?
Comparatives
Derivations
The articles
Sentence order
Noun phrase order
You have yes-no questions, right?
How about other questions?
Negation
Conjunctions and such
Relative clauses
Adverbials
Transformations
Syntactic trees
Asterisks mean don’t do that!
Auxiliaries
Relative clauses
Cases in relativized clauses
Limits on relativization
Topicalization
Fronting
Passivization
Clefting
More comments on topics
Causatives
Anaphora
Nominalization
Question and negative formation
Semantics
The meaning of meaning
Meaning in pictures
The structure of the lexicon
Hierarchies
Different dividing lines
What gets a name?
Intention and utterance
Reference mismatch and new senses
More on speakers speaking
Some oddities of meaning
Language and logic
Semantic change
Metaphor systems
Metaphor as cognition
Grammaticalized metaphor
Perspective
Perspective on verbs
Categories and prototypes
Basic categories
Register
Some semantic fields
Divisions of time
Directions
Names and titles
Given names
Other names
Nicknames
Titles
Expletives and obscenities
Pragmatics
Deixis
Implicature
Conversational maxims
Lexical implicatures
Presupposition
Speech acts
Discourse structure
Turn-taking
Adjacency pairs
Pre-sequences
Long turns
Greetings and closings
Repair
Pragmatic markers
Narrative
Politeness
Politeness strategies
Cultural differences
Real-world knowledge
Frames and metonymy
Culture
Style
Poetry
Language families
Sound change
Notation
A language family
Proto-languages
Dialects
The Sound Change Applier
An example
Morphology
After using the SCA
Cheap ’n easy language families
Sound changes to get you started
Irregular changes
Going backwards
Writing systems
Preliminaries
Bits of writing
Medium
Direction
Variation
Conservativism
Completeness
Producing fonts
Alphabets
On starting with alphabets
Consonantal alphabets
Abugidas
Logograms
Extending the system
Clarifying signs
Syllabaries
Featural systems
Punctuation
Kebreni
Phonology
Morphology
Verbs
Aspect (imperfective and perfective)
Volition
Polite forms
Positive effect
Negative effect
Subordinating form
Pronouns
Personal pronouns
Demonstratives
Interrogative pronouns
Quantifiers and indefinite pronouns
Numbers
Derivational morphology
Syntax
Parameter order
Indirect objects
Verbs of movement
Noun phrases
Order
The -te relativizer
Existence and equivalence
Adjectives
Attributes
Predicates
Substantives
Comparatives
Adverbs
Conjunctions
Locative verbs
Questions
Yes-no questions
Question words
Complex sentences
Sentences as objects
Adverbial conjunctions
Relative clauses
Example
Sound changes
Lexicon
Word lists
The Swadesh list
Adjectives
Nouns
Verbs
Grammatical words
Sophomore list
Adjectives
Nouns
Verbs
Grammatical words
Courtesy
The Modern World
Geographical terms
Geographical terms
Human terms
Useful adjectives
More to read
Web resources
Conworlding
Five books to read
More books
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