Excursus for posterity: Syntactic nomenclature

This preamble to a post on purpose clauses was originally written on July 27, 2025. Now that the world has changed this has become rather quaint, but I preserve it here as an artifact of what I was already beginning to feel strongly last year. I note that I was also seeing this in the water as long ago as January 2012, which feels a little poignant to read. I have been struggling with this for such a long time!

There is also an onomastically frustrating pair doing a lot of heavy lifting: on the one hand the nominal clause, referring to a finite clause being used in nominal syntactic positions; and on the other the nominalized clause, a non-finite clause which has formally become a nominal with all the expected syntactic properties. As discussed previously, we really seriously need some better nomenclature here.

As also discussed previously, it's not entirely clear how applicable or useful the language of "finiteness" is for Koa in the first place. I continue to use the terminology out of habit because that's how these structures might be described in other languages, and I haven't come up with anything more Koa-specific. I suppose I could use even more standard language and say "complement clause" instead of "nominal clause," "relative clause" instead of "adjectival clause," and so on, but here's the thing:

In most languages there's a haphazard variety of strategies in use to achieve these communicative needs, and it makes sense to group them under a labeled conceptual umbrella like "complement clause." In Koa, though, most of these are just clauses -- plain old finite clauses, like any other -- and the only difference is which clause marker they each bear. This is analogous to the way that Koa dispenses with formal lexical class, with nominal/adjectival/verbal/adverbial/etc. status being determined entirely by syntactic context. It feels weird to give something a secondary label when its meaning is already transparently derivable from first principles.

Just like all "content words" in Koa are called "predicates," and when I need to refer to their use in a specific context I can say "nominal predicate," or more wordily "a predicate used in a nominal context," I wonder if I could do something similar with clauses. Koa has its own terminology for these things: for example méama, literally "thinger," for the above type of syntactic context.

The mistakes we make

For the last 24 years there have been two areas of Koa syntax that have vexed me above all others. My posts on the subject have constituted a kind of chronicle of miseries as I thrashed back and forth trying to make sense of these things; I have made and then retracted the same decisions multiple times. To wit --

On specifiers and indefinite participant marking: First thoughts on syntax (2002), The birth of the modern article system (2003), Specifier clarification, possession, and other changes (2009), The sweeping generalization in Koa (2010), Specifier flowchart (2010), Object incorporation (2011), Marking indefinite NPs (2012), Quantifiers and specifiers (2021), What's in a specifier? (2022), Some, all and none (2025)

On dependent clauses: More Thoughts, Obtained Whilst Tossing & Turning (2007), Embedded clauses: the show so far (2012), New embedded clause options (2012), The Grand Unified Theory of dependent clauses (2019), Entr'acte: The vanity of logic and typological neutrality (2021), Resolving the probability waveform of dependent clauses (2021), Dependent clauses re-re-reenvisioned (2023), Bride of the nominalized clause (2023), Finite clause types at last (2025)

I had also been noticing that, as happy as I was in the moment with my recent progress in these areas, Koa syntax had become rigid and brittle in a way I was increasingly dismayed with. It made me less excited to work on the language or speak it, and I found myself wondering with a certain amount of resentment how it was that Nahuatl -- omnipredicative very analogously to Koa -- was allowed to be so fluid and relaxed.

And then, out of nowhere, earlier this week it suddenly dawned on me that these woes are really all the same problem. Crucially, it's not the syntactic/pragmatic design problem I thought it was: in fact, it's a cluster of dead ends manufactured largely by Indo-European grammatical terminology and the assumptions imported along with it. There are actually good answers to these formerly intractable questions, answers that are internally consistent, cross-typologically defensible and loyal to the spirit of the language, answers that let Koa sway and breathe.

Answers to other questions, sometimes surprising ones, have tumbled out alongside them this past week, and I find myself in a rather profound moment in the conceptual history of this language. All of this -- the understandings, the changes that follow from them, and a new meta-language of description that won't tie the system in knots with IE artifacts -- is still unfolding. Nonetheless I want to try to document what I now know about my own language, and where I suddenly clearly see critical mistakes to have been made in the past.

...unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the implications of all these changes and realizations have turned out to be quite broad. I had initially thought I would be writing a single post today that would sum it all up, but my docket has ballooned to essentially the size of a small reference grammar:

1. Lexical Class in Koa
1.1 The Particle
1.2 The Predicate
1.2.1 Predicate Functions
1.2.2 Pronominals
2. Argument Marking
2.1 Specifiers
2.2 Quantifiers
2.3 Operator Nesting / Scope layering
2.4 Compound Proforms (Correlatives)
2.5 Existential Structures
2.6 Negative Existentials & Concord
2.7. Disambiguation & Emphasis
3. Modifiers
3.1 Modifier Marking
3.2 Relativization
3.3 Object Incorporation
4. Argument Juxtaposition
4.1 Pronominal Possession
4.2 Predicate Possession
4.3 Ditransitive Arguments
4.4 Other Uses of Juxtaposition
5. Adjunctives & Relators
5.1 With Arguments
5.2 With Clauses
6. The Clause
6.1 Clause Markers
6.2 Finiteness & Nominalization
7. Constructional Specification
7.1 Categorical Typing
7.2 Output Constructions

So this is a very exciting list of topics to (A) finally understand fully and (B) get to write about, and also I wish I could take a week off of work in which to do it: I'm pretty sure the right venue for this would be a cabin by an alpine lake in Slovenia. Hopefully my girls will let me sneak away a bit this coming week.