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Adwan: Difference between revisions
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== Morphology == | == Morphology == | ||
=== Nouns === | === Nouns === | ||
Noun morphology is largely agglutinative with varying mechanisms of agglutination based on the grammatical category and paradigm involved. Noun case can be viewed as appending a vowel suffix to the stem of a noun, and varying that stem according to the necessary case, i.e., case distinctions are made by variations in a single vowel. | |||
Nouns may be marked for possession, where a possessed noun is marked for its possessor. Because of this, Adwan has no possessive pronouns, and in fact employs an empty nominal stem ("h", which incidentally is the stem for "pronouns") in predicative constructions denoting possession such as "<i>that's mine!</i>". The affixes involved in marking nouns for possession are actually <i>infixes</i>, fitting in between the noun stem and the case ending. Therefore, since the infix for the 1st person is <i>-in-</i>, it follows that the noun <i>purga</i> ("dog"), would be expressed as <i>purgina</i> for the English translation of "my dog". | |||
Adwan exhibits little to no standalone determiners as free morphemes. Instead, an array of determiner infixes are used with nouns, with determiner and possessive infixes exhibiting a complementary distribution (i.e., determiner infixes and posssessive infixes can never be found together in the same noun, each being seen as exclusive to the other). Thus, in order to express <i>"This is my dog"</i>, the determiners corresponding to 'this' and 'my' would need to belong to separate head nouns. Consider the infix <i>-ent-</i>. While the utterance <i>'purgenta'</i> and <i>'purgina'</i> roughly translate to 'this dog' and 'my dog', the corresponding expressions for 'this is my dog' and 'this dog is mine' would require the determiner infix <i>-ent-</i> corresponding to 'this' and the determiner infix <i>-in-</i> corresponding to 'my' would need to be situated in entirely different nouns; as mentioned above, the empty noun stem <i>h</i> is used in these sorts of situations, as shown below: | |||
* <i>Purg<u>ina</u>r h<u>enta</u>.</i><br>Purg-in-a-r h-ent-a<br>dog-1.POSS-NOM-3 Ø-PROX-NOM<br>"This is my dog." | |||
* <i>H<u>ina</u>r purg<u>enta</u>.</i><br>H-in-a-r purg-ent-a<br>Ø-1.POSS-NOM-3 dog-PROX-NOM<br>"This dog is mine." | |||
==== Cases ==== | |||
== Syntax == | == Syntax == | ||