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Kirtumur nouns: Difference between revisions
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A typical Kirtumur sentence consists of a finite verbal form and, as a rule, one or more noun phrases. The verb form refers to a certain action and to its participants having roles in that action. Usually its participants are noun phrases. A noun phrase is, broadly speaking, a grammatical unit of one or more words which is in some case, expressed by an enclitic case marker which is attached to the last word of the noun phrase. A noun phrase can refer to one or more persons, animals, things, to a time, a place, etc., depending on the context. Case markers establish roles which noun phrases play in a sentence and also mark boundaries of the individual noun phrases. | A typical Kirtumur sentence consists of a finite verbal form and, as a rule, one or more noun phrases. The verb form refers to a certain action and to its participants having roles in that action. Usually its participants are noun phrases. A noun phrase is, broadly speaking, a grammatical unit of one or more words which is in some case, expressed by an enclitic case marker which is attached to the last word of the noun phrase. A noun phrase can refer to one or more persons, animals, things, to a time, a place, etc., depending on the context. Case markers establish roles which noun phrases play in a sentence and also mark boundaries of the individual noun phrases. | ||
==Structure== | ==Structure== | ||
A crucial point in describing the structure of a noun phrase is to establish its | A crucial point in describing the structure of a noun phrase is to establish its '''head''' – usually a noun, central to a noun phrase the same way, how a finite verb is central to a verb phrase. It determines both the general meaning and the general grammatical properties of the phrase as a whole. For instance, the following noun phrase: | ||
:{| | |||
|ŋirak | |||
|ēlnenues ... | |||
|- | |||
|ŋir-ak | |||
|ēl-nen-u-es ... | |||
|- | |||
|person-PL | |||
|word-3PL.POSS-1SG.POSS-ERG | |||
|- | |||
| colspan="2" | "My witnesses ..." | |||
|} | |||
The noun ''ŋirak'' "people" is the head of this phrase. It determines the general meaning of the phrase, which refers to a specific kind of "people". It also determines the gender of the phrase, which is animate, and thus it is the gender of the head noun, even though it also countains the inanimate noun ''ēl'' "word". The ergative marker ''-es'' shows the boundary of the phrase and that it performs the role of the agent (the complete sentence is not shown here, however). Most noun phrases have a noun as their head, but numerals, [[w:Ideophone|ideophones]] and nominalized phrases can also be used as heads of noun phrases. | |||
===Number=== | ===Number=== | ||
Kirtumur nouns inflect for three numbers: singular, dual and plural, though only animate and a few naturally paired inanimate nouns can have dual forms. | Kirtumur nouns inflect for three numbers: singular, dual and plural, though only animate and a few naturally paired inanimate nouns can have dual forms. | ||