It's been a bit since I posted here. I'm still working on that same lang from a while back, and I've realized something: I don't think I know much about cross-linguistic grammar. Usually, I would lean towards a feature common in, say, an Indo-European language.
I'd prefer not to do this, and to instead extrapolate and create features from all sorts of different natlangs, know which features are common depending on syntax (mine is strongly head-initial), how to extrapolate new TAM distinctions and what TAM distinctions to include on verbs… basically, I do not want to be trapped by my current understanding of syntax and grammar.
In general, I seem to find myself at a loss for most everything outside of phonology.
Syntax is how words get “tied together” to make some larger meaningful piece of an utterance, such as a phrase or a clause or a sentence.
Usually syntax governs, or partly governs, word-order, as well.
Morphology is how words get inflected or derived to form other versions of the same word.
(This can be affixes, or changing which syllable gets the stress, or changing the tone of one or more syllables, or lengthening or shortening one or more of the vowels, or changing the vowel-quality to some other vowel-quality. And that’s probably not all!)
For instance;
Nouns often inflect for case, definiteness/indefiniteness or referentiality/nonreferentiality, pragmatic status such as topic or focus or neither, gender (although commonly the nouns aren’t themselves marked for their gender; rather the associated words are marked to agree with the noun’s gender), number, sometimes person (although frequently other words associated with the noun are marked to agree with the noun’s person), quality (whether common or proper), and probably others I’ve left out.
Adjectives are often* inflected to agree with the case, gender, number, maybe person(* probably not that often), of the noun they modify; degree (positive or comparative or superlative or equative(** is that the right word), and maybe others.
Verbs often are inflected for aspect, tense, modality/mode/mood, voice, polarity, and less often for evidentiality, mirativity, pluractionality, and so on. They’re frequently also inflected for valence, and/or some grammatical feature(s) of one or more of their arguments.
Adverbs, like adjectives, often inflect for degree, and often inflect for grammatical features of the word they modify.
Adpositions are likely to inflect to agree with some grammatical feature of their target noun-phrase.
And conjunctions may inflect to agree with some features of their conjugands.
Derivation is morphology that (among other things) creates a word of a different part-of-speech than its source word.
Good luck! I hope that helps!
It's been a bit since I posted here. I'm still working on that same lang from a while back, and I've realized something: I don't think I know much about cross-linguistic grammar. Usually, I would lean towards a feature common in, say, an Indo-European language.
I'd prefer not to do this, and to instead extrapolate and create features from all sorts of different natlangs, know which features are common depending on syntax (mine is strongly head-initial), how to extrapolate new TAM distinctions and what TAM distinctions to include on verbs… basically, I do not want to be trapped by my current understanding of syntax and grammar.
In general, I seem to find myself at a loss for most everything outside of phonology.
I think you'll appreciate the suggestive (not really suggested!) grammar lists Salmoneus and I put together here:
![[<3]](./images/smilies/heartic.png "<3"){kind=small}
Native Speaker 
Intermediate 
Beginner 
Beginner
