#grammar evolution

[quarks-and-quirks]

Early Hominids: ugh

*language evolution*

AMH: UG

[dedalvs]

I've just started on a new natlang spoken by an alien race, and I had an idea for syntax I'm not sure about. Nouns are either animate or inanimate and inflect differently, but they also take adpositions in different places e.g. animate nouns take prepositions while inanimate nouns take postpositions. Basically, do you think this feasible for a natlang, albeit a non-human one?

On first blush, no. Upon thinking further, also no. The only possible way I can imagine it is if it so happened that animate nouns developed adpositions from one lexical source, and inanimate nouns from the other (so, say, animate adpositions came from nouns, and inanimate came from verbs)—and nominal possession and object and verbs had different headedness—and the adpositions duplicated each other’s meanings perfectly. So, for example, if the adposition that ended up being “from” derived from the word for “arm” when it was applying to an animate noun, but derived from “come” when it was applying to an inanimate noun, and the word order was SVO but otherwise head-final, then that would do it, but you’d need to come up with a case for each adposition category, and a reason why you couldn’t use one category with other (you can say you wouldn’t use the “arm” one with inanimates, sure, but why not “come” with animates?). In short, it seems highly, highly improbable to have evolved naturally—or at least in such pristine fashion.