- Overview of Morphosyntax
- Syntactical Functions
- Classification of Inflected Words
- Kinds of Nouns
- Kinds of Verbs
- Non-Stem Inflections
- Argument Marking
- Location Marking
K'tle uses a direct/inverse system with a 2 > 1 > 3 person hierarchy. There's neither case nor obviation marking. There's also no morphological tense. K'tle marks number (singular and plural) where relevent.
Word order is mostly pragmatic rather than syntactical. The topic, if explicit, must appear first in the sentence; old information is usually placed before the verb and new information is usually placed after the verb; any contrastively focused constituent must appear at the end of its clause.
Except for a few particles, all K'tle words are inflected. The major division of inflected words is into nouns and verbs, but note that nouns take many of the same inflections as verbs, the differences being covered in Classification of Inflected Words below.
Words that might be classified as adjectives, adverbs, adpositions, pronouns, or quantifiers in another language are all considered verbs or forms of verbs in K'tle (except for some pronouns which are better thought of as nouns). Verbs are inflected for aspect, modality, polarity, argument agreement, and syntactical function.
The syntactical functions are primary, secondary, nominal, and attributive.
Lexical nouns can take most of these forms as well, although the most frequent forms are those for syntactical nouns.
All nouns have a subject argument; except when the noun is used as a primary or nominal clause predicate, this argument is coreferential. With respect to argument structure, there are two kinds of nouns: those with an obligatory possessor and those without one. Nouns are also divided according to gender, which is implicit for each noun and independent of its argument structure. The genders are animate (which includes people, all animals, robots, and certain natural phenomena such as fire, wind, lightning, and flowing water) and inanimate (everything else). The second argument of obligatorily possessed nouns (i.e. the possessor) also has an implicit gender. Nouns may also be divided into count nouns (which have plural forms) and mass nouns (which don't, and are all inanimate).
| Valence | Name | WC | Argument-2 | Argument-1 | Gender | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monovalent | Non-Possessed | NA | subject | A | Animate | ||
| NI | subject | I | Inanimate | ||||
| Divalent | Possessed | OA | Possessor | A | subject | A | Animate |
| OI | Possessor | A/I | subject | I | Inanimate | ||
| WC stands for Word Class; O stands for Obligatorily possessed noun. | |||||||
Finally, some inflectional categories, such as aspect and degree of comparison, are not possible for nouns.
Verbs are classified as dynamic (denoting a type of event, action, or process) or stative (denoting other kinds of situations). Stative verbs are further classified as to whether degree of comparison applies to them (these are termed adjectives here) or not. Stative verbs also differ from dynamic verbs in their use of the aspects (see MAJOR ASPECTS).
The most syntactically important property of a verb is its argument structure. Based on which of the three possible arguments (called Argument-1, Argument-2, and Argument-3) it has, a verb belongs to one of five groups. One part of argument structure is the number of arguments it has; this is called the verb's valence. A verb with one argument is monovalent, one with two is divalent, and one with three is trivalent. However, valence in itself isn't too important for K'tle ; what is important is which arguments are used, the semantic roles which apply to them, and which genders they allow.
The five groups of verbs, with their names and descriptions, are shown in the table below. For each argument, the semantic role and allowed genders are given.
| WC | Name | Argument-2 | Argument-3 | Argument-1 | Valence | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Patientive | descriptee | A/I | Monovalent | ||||
| V | Agentive | actor | A | |||||
| 2 | Transitive | agent | A | patient | A/I (2) | Divalent | ||
| R | Relational | object (1) | A/I | subject (1) | A/I | |||
| 3 | Ditransitive | donor | A | theme | I | recipient | A | Trivalent |
| A | means that animate arguments are allowed | |||||||
| I | means that inanimate arguments are allowed | |||||||
| (1) | The terms subject and object are used for semantic roles here, not for grammatical relations! | |||||||
| (2) | When an inverse or reciprocal form is used, the patient must be animate. | |||||||
The semantic roles used in the table above are placed according to the direct forms of the verbs. Word classes 2, R, and 3 may also have inverse forms (where the roles for Argument-2 and Argument-1 are swapped) and word classes 2 and 3 reciprocal forms (where Argument-2 and Argument-1 both take both roles).
A relational verb specifies how its "subject" relates to its "object", which is a location for most relational verbs.
In addition to verbs denoting actions, the transitive group also includes verbs denoting types of perception and mental states, where the "agent" is more of a "perceiver".
The stem of an inflected word consists of all its morphemes except those used for syntactical function, argument marking, and location marking.
The marking of noun subjects and Argument-1 on verbs is done using suffixes (or in some cases, the absence of any suffix). Personal agreement, secondary coreference, adjectival agreement, and noun number are all considered to be Argument-1 marking here.
The marking of noun possessors and Argument-2 on verbs is done using prefixes (or in some cases, the absence of any prefix). The marking of Argument-3 on verbs is also done using prefixes (or in one case, the absence of any prefix); the Argument-3 prefix follows the Argument-2 prefix when both appear. Argument prefixes are all either personal agreement or coreference. However, inversion (argument role assignment) and mood affect the types of Argument-2 prefixes used.
Location is another thing that can be marked on a verb. It's semi-required for certain verbs and for some others (mainly relational) it can't appear at all. Otherwise, it's optional and appears after any argument prefixes, but before any incorporated nouns.
If the verb is dynamic, the location can specify the location, origin, destination, or general direction of one or more argument referents. If the verb is static, it can specify only the location of a referent and only some of the location markers can be used on static verbs. The currently known location markers are:
| Prefix | Gloss | Verb Type | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ta- | hither | dynamic only | to/toward | [the location of] a 1st person referent |
| here | dynamic/stative | at | ||
| to̅h- | hence | dynamic only | away from | |
| teak- | dynamic only | passing by | ||
| For ta-, to̅'-, and teak-, the 1st person reference can be inclusive. | ||||
| ha- | thither | dynamic only | to/toward | [the location of] some non-1st person referent |
| there | dynamic/stative | at | ||
| ho̅h- | thence | dynamic only | away from | |
| heak- | dynamic only | passing by | ||
| For ha-, ho̅'-, and heak-, the reference can't be 1st person inclusive. | ||||
| oh- | around | dynamic only | series of destinations | |
| i̅h- | dynamic only | no particular direction | ||
| oh- and i̅h- are indefinite and can therefore be used in content questions; | ||||
| they were originally just phonetically conditioned variants of the same prefix. | ||||
The proposed additional location markers are:
- uphill OR away from a body of water (above the speaker if stative)
- downhill OR to/toward a body of water (below the speaker if stative)
- across level ground OR across a body of water
page started: 2009.Mar.13 Fri
prior version: 2009.Apr.10 Fri
last modified: 2009.Oct.20 Tue
content and form originated by qiihoskeh
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