Sentences

The structure of morphemes, phrases and sentence constituents.

Morphosyntactics

Hisyëö is called an isolating language because all words are a single morpheme. A morpheme is a single unit of meaning. In English, the word "cat" is a single morpheme but the word "cats" is two morphemes: "cat" + "s" where the "s" is the morpheme that signifies that a noun is plural. The word "intwined" is three morphemes, "in" for the meaning of interconnectedness, "twine" for the verb that means to wrap or weave with a twine-like object, and "ed" for the past participle of the verb (the modifier form in past tense). Some examples of isolating languages are Yoruba, Vietnamese, and Thai.

Hisyëö is also considered an analytic language, which means that prepositions, particles and modifiers are used to provide the additional meaning to words instead of adding prefixes and affixes to words. English is mostly an analytic language although there are some instances of affixes (such as "-ed", "-ing", "-s"). There are no prefixes and affices in Hisyëö, all meaning is provided via words and prepositions and particles.

Constituent Word Order

The order with which you setup a clause or sentence is called constituent order. Sentences are made up of verb and noun phrases that exist within prepositional phrases. Let's ignore what prepositional phrases are available for the time being and just zoom out and think about subject phrases (with noun phrases within), action phrases (with verb phrases within), and semantic phrases (with noun phrases within). Many languages require that you order your sentence in a particular way such that each element along the way can be understood as a paritcular part of the sentence. Some of the most popular constituent orders that occur in natural languages include: subject-object-verb, subject-verb-object, verb-second, and topic-comment. In addition to these sentence structure types, there also exists some languages that have no strict word order. Instead they use morphological elements to identify the different parts of the sentence. In these languages, the order in which the parts of a sentence are provided may indicate the theme or theme of a sentence as well.

Hisyëö has a free constituent order because all sentence parts are marked by a preposition. From a topic-comment lens, the order of your sentence puts the first provided element as the topic and the rest as successively less important comments about the topic. That said, there is one preferred ordering because there is one preposition that can be elided (skipped): the lı

realis verb marker. This marker precedes the main action of the sentence and specifically an action that is definitely occurring or has occurred. Because of this elision rule, sentences are often either verb-subject-object or verb-object-subject.

Phrase Word Order

Within any given phrase there is always one word that is the main contents of that noun or verb phrase. This is known as the nucleus of the phrase. In some languages the nucleus is the first word and in other languages the nucleus is the last word in a phrase. The nucleus of an action phrase is a verb, the nucleus of a subject or semantic phrase is a noun. Hisyëö has a nucleus in the middle of a phrase (it is a nucleus, after all). Determiners go to the left of the nucleus and modifiers to the right.

Sentence Types

Simple

A simple sentence consists of a single independent clause with no dependent clauses.

Compound

A compound sentence consists of multiple independent clauses with no dependent clauses. These clauses are joined together using conjunctions.

Complex

A complex sentence consists of one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.

Compound-Complex

A compound–complex sentence (or complex–compound sentence) consists of multiple independent clauses, at least one of which has at least one dependent clause.

Speech Acts

Assertives

Speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition

Directives

Speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice

Commissives

Speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths

Expressives

Speech acts that express on the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks

Declarations

Speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife