(no subject)

I've long had a not-very-well-worked-out idea of a semi-language. It's a communication system that's much more limited than natural human languages, but still has more properties of language than known animal communication systems. (Who or what would use this semi-language? I don't know.)

It has words. It doesn't have morphology: every word is monomorphemic. And the only syntactic unit larger than a word is a two-word sentence. Anything beyond that is pragmatically determined.

At the moment, I think the way I'd work this out is that every sentence has a subject and a predicate. The subject comes first, the predicate comes second. (Okay, single-word sentences, as just a "nominal" or just an argumentless predicate, are probably also possible.) There are no pronouns. There are obviously no transitive predicates, but there may be corresponding (morphologically unrelated) predicates for the two halves of a transitive relationship:

man strike
tree be.struck

where "strike" and "be.struck" are two monomorphemic independent words.

Obviously the kinds of things that could be communicated with this system would be more limited than what can be expressed with natural language.