This chapter explores ways you can expand information provided in noun phrases, with the first half focusing on grammatical specification and the second half on semantic modification. The first section investigates the types of determiners that occur in languages, including articles and demonstratives, and the second section focuses on possessive forms and the types of relationships they can reflect. The final two sections introduce modifiers that can occur within noun phrases, including adjectives and adposition phrases. You will decide if your language will have any adjectives belonging to its basic vocabulary and set a foundation for the shapes modifiers take within noun phrases.

The first section of the chapter introduces you to the world of pronouns, beginning with personal pronouns, whose (typically small) forms can inflect to indicate a wide range of grammatical information: person, number, class, and case. The next section focuses on other pronouns, including demonstrative, reflexive, and indefinite forms. The chapter ends with a discussion of verb agreement to demonstrate how verbs can inflect to agree with at least one argument in the clause and connects verb agreement inflections to pronouns and their use. By the end of this chapter, you will have developed series of pronouns for your language and made your first major decision about verb inflections.

This chapter focuses on foundational grammatical concepts, first discussing the basic difference between content and function lexical categories before moving on to morphological language type, grammaticalization, and inflectional marking. The information investigated in this and the next four chapters is so interconnected that the material, as it is presented, is a bit like a spiral. One section will introduce you to a specific concept with a handful of other concepts and then a later section will return to that initial concept while discussing other related concepts. This material will continue to be presented using a spiraling method, linking the major grammatical concepts of this and the next four chapters. The grammatical decisions you will make at the end of this chapter focus on how much grammatical information is packaged within a single word unit and how constituents beyond the subject, object, and verb are typically ordered in clauses.

Chapter 8 provides a summary of the book’s key findings, emphasizing how the retrieval-based account provides better empirical coverage over the representational-based accounts. This chapter then explores key outstanding questions in the study of linguistic illusions, including the interaction between encoding and retrieval processes, individual differences, the effects of good-enough processing, and the role of different linguistic features across languages. The chapter concludes by outlining future directions for research, suggesting potential interventions to reduce attraction errors through memory training and timing manipulations. As the final chapter, it reflects on how scientific inquiry continues to evolve, encouraging further investigation into the cognitive mechanisms behind real-time language processing.

This chapter introduces strategies for building new words from existing pieces in the language. The first section introduces the concept of lexical gaps, some of which may be filled by expanding the lexicon using word-formation processes. The second and third sections discuss the two most common word-formation processes, compounding and derivation. The fourth section introduces conversion and semantic extension, which are methods for expanding a lexicon without creating new word forms. The chapter ends with a discussion on borrowing (though borrowing will not be appropriate for every conlang). By the end of this chapter, you will expand the vocabulary of your conlang to include words that have been derived and/or compounded and will consider how you might expand the definitions of existing words to include new meanings.

This chapter begins the focus on grammar, which includes all the information (or “rules”) necessary to generate new, meaningful utterances in a language. The basic introduction provided in this chapter provides the foundation you will need for all the upcoming chapters. The first and second sections introduce major concepts like grammatical form, grammatical function, word order, and headedness. The third section provides a sample walkthrough of how to work with linguistic data sets to analyze a language’s grammatical patterns, a skill that is useful for conlangers to develop a stronger understanding of grammatical structures. The fourth section models the decision-making process you will follow as you make initial decisions about your conlang’s grammar.

Verbs are typically the most grammatically complicated and diverse constituents within any clause structure. The information presented in this chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive resource; rather, my goal is to introduce foundational concepts that can support your own research of additional features. The first section introduces tense and aspect, two key types of inflections that occur with verbs, and mood and evidential marking are introduced in the second section. The third section explores negation strategies and auxiliary verbs, while the fourth dives into valency-changing inflections, including the passive voice. By the end of this chapter, you will have made decisions about marking verbs in clause structures and will be able to translate basic clauses into your language.

This chapter focuses on the art of translation now that you have enough components inyour language to begin using it to express a variety of concepts and ideas. The first section introduces general translation practices, discussing the importance of translating an intended meaning rather than substituting one language’s words for another. The second section provides examples of how you can use translation as an exercise of language expansion, creating new vocabulary and constructions as needed to communicate a particular meaning. At the end of this chapter, you will be asked to translate a short text into your conlang and to write an original text in your language to showcase your language and its features.