User:Masako/nkala

Morphosyntax

• Simple declarative sentences usually have a subject-object-verb word order, though occasionally adverbs fall outside this paradigm and various particles can free-up word order. Kala has four grammatical persons — first, second, third, and obviative. The third person is used for proximate nouns, while obviates are non-present or demoted in comparison to a third person. Inanimate objects cannot be the proximate third person. Kala is an agglutinative language. It uses various affixes, mostly suffixes, to change the meaning and grammatical function of words.

Nouns are inflected for number.

animacy

All nouns are classified as either animate or inanimate. Generally it is easy to determine whether a noun will be animate, although some inherently inanimate objects such as...

Arguments of verbs are marked with a (patient marker) transitivity prefix/particle which must agree with the animacy of its arguments. Even in stories in which a grammatically inanimate object are markedly anthropomorphized, such as talking flowers, speakers will not use animate agreement markers with them.

verbs

The Kala verbal template contains a stem with several suffixes. The structure of the verb stem in Kala can be roughly broken down into the root, the medial, and the final. The root and final tend to be required elements. In Kala, the category of verb may also include words that would be categorized as adjectives or quantifiers in English.

nouns

pronouns

• pronominal constructions