Creating the Grammar, part 1
Step 1: Preferred Word Order
This refers to the most common order of subject, object, and verb that a language uses. For example, in English, the preferred word order is SVO (subject-verb-object). This doesn’t mean that speakers of a particular language always do things that way, or that there aren’t situations where it is acceptable or even expected to use a different order, just that this is the “proper” order under most circumstances. Some languages have two or three preferred orders (in which case the order being used has an effect on focus, nuance, or meaning). Those with complex but flexible grammar occasionally have no preferred order. But to keep things simple, we’ll use just one.
SVO and SOV I rejected immediately. These are by far the most common, and I’m going for “exotic”. VSO is third most common. But it’s not really that rare, either, so it’s out too. OVS is the rarest. But languages which use only OVS as a preferred word order, while they do exist, are almost unheard of. I’m going for “exotic”, not “alien”, so… That just leaves OSV and VOS. Since my previous experiments mostly used either SVO or OSV, and I’m trying to do something rather different than usual… by process of elimination it’s going to be Verb-Object-Subject.
Step 2: Morphosyntactic Alignment:
This is somewhat related to word order; the shortest way I can think of to explain it would be that this is how a language “marks” which part of the sentence is what. English lacks a morphosyntactic alignment [previous statement is probably incorrect], which is kind of unusual, and is the simplest possible way of doing things – but since all of my previous experiments didn’t bother with it, “none” is not an option here.
According to the online resources I read, the options are: Accusative, Ergative, Split Ergative, Phillipine, Active-Stative, or Tripartite. I’m not explaining them all here, as it would take far too much space. Let’s just say that the only one which seems to fit both my “simple” and “exotic” criteria is Ergative. Basically, it means that the only thing which gets “marked” (with an article or affix, for example) is the subject of a transitive verb. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it yet.
However, after abstractly messing around with the concept in my head for awhile, I think I figured out why a pure ergative alignment, as opposed to the more complex split-ergative, is fairly rare – sometimes it doesn’t play nice with ditransitive ambitransitive* verbs (that is, verbs which can be either transitive or intransitive) unless the word order is SVO or OVS. Since I’m using neither of those… avoid creating ditransitive ambitransitive* verbs if possible? I’ll just leave it at this for now and revisit the issue later if it becomes a problem.
*The term “Ditransitive” was originally used in error, should be “ambitransitive”, is now corrected
The Eljan Experiment 
Interesting, you’ve made two mistakes in your post:
– “English lacks a morphosyntactic alignment”: that is incorrect. English is a run-of-the-mill accusative language. It may not have very overt core argument markings, but it is still very easy to see that in English the subject of a transitive verb and of an intransitive verb behave the same, while the object of a transitive verb is treated differently (for instance, in the third person singular both the subject of an intransitive verb and of a transitive verb trigger the verbal agreement -s. Another example is the pronouns: they use the same form for the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb – I, he, she, we, they -, but a different one for the object of a transitive verb – me, him, her, us, them -). English verbs are very fluid in terms of transitivity (i.e. they can change valency without overt marking), but it’s something else than claiming that English doesn’t have a morphosyntactic alignment.
– “ditransitive verbs (that is, verbs which can be either transitive or intransitive)”: that’s not what ditransitive verbs are. Ditransitive verbs are verbs like “to give” that take two objects (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditransitive_verb). Verbs that can be either transitive or intransitive are called ambitransitive verbs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambitransitive_verb).
Okay, fine. Had to check up on those things to be certain, but the text has been mostly corrected. For the morphosyntactic thing, that’s my fault. I wasn’t even aware of the term until about a week ago. I am familiar with a number of languages which have obvious syntactic markers, which English lacks, and I haven’t read anything yet which gives English as an example of an accusative language, so the obvious (but probably incorrect) conclusion is that it doesn’t have any.
For the incorrect usage of the term “ditransitive”, blame that on a crappy education.
English has RELICS of syntactic alignment but very few are left over from Old English…so it is fair to say that English doesn’t have a syntactic alignment, only archaic forms that are still in use by CUSTOM rather than true grammatic structuring…so there 😛
@eljanicator: for English as an accusative language, go no further than the Wikipedia page about morphosyntactic alignment. It lists English as a nominative-accusative language in the section “Ergative vs. accusative”. As for the mistake with “ditransitive”, it’s not as if “ambitransitive” is such a well known word either, so it’s understandable 🙂 .
@contemplativemoorings: there’s more to syntactic alignment than overt markings like case endings, adpositions and verbal agreement. Word order and semantics of coordinated clauses can indicate syntactic alignment just as well. And in the case of English, they make it very clear that it is an accusative language. For instance, when you say “I took a book from the bookshelf and sat down”, the subject of the intransitive “sat” is understood to be identical to the agent of the transitive “took”. That is a case of accusative alignment. If the alignment was ergative, for instance, that sentence would mean that the book sat! True neutral languages (with no syntactic alignment) exist, but they are rare, and are recognisable because in the example I gave above, both interpretations I gave would be equally plausible! (and the one that is meant would have to be gathered by context) No, English is definitely an accusative language, there’s no question about that.
The noun verbed an object adverbly
In some prepositional phrase,
And conjunction to subordinate clause
Should perfect subjunctive pronouns full stop.
🙂
Eh, Christophe, in the sentence you gave as an example, the phrase “a book” can be placed anywhere in the sentence and be understood as a direct object…it clearly is determined by context that “a book” is an object and not the alignment of the words…