Phonology and Grammar Portfolio

Your language systems rather than its vocabulary — inventory, phonotactics, morphology and syntax, written so that somebody else could build from them

Due

2 April 2027, 5pm

Weight

15% of the course

Set in

week 6

The brief#

Hand in the machine, not what it produced.

This is a checkpoint on the first five weeks, and it wants your systems. A hundred beautiful words with no stated rules behind them will not pass; twenty words and a set of rules that generate them will.

The third criterion is the one people lose marks on, and it is worth explaining. Your inventory, your syllable formula, your morphology and your word order were each decided in a different week, and it is entirely possible to have four defensible decisions that contradict one another — a syllable structure that forbids clusters and a verb template whose affixes produce them, say. Nobody notices this while building one subsystem at a time. The portfolio is where you read all four together for the first time.

If you find a contradiction, fix it and say what you fixed. Documented repairs are marked better than an inconsistency nobody mentioned.

What you submit#

One document. The inventory in IPA with a note on any sound your speakers’ anatomy makes unusual, the syllable structure as a formula, your morphological type in a sentence, the verb template written out, your basic word order, and three sentences glossed morpheme by morpheme.

The test of the whole thing is the third spec line. Give it to somebody in the course who has not seen your language and ask them to invent a word in it. If what they produce is illegal under your rules, the document is not finished.