Nankôre: Difference between revisions

Nankôre nouns, at first glance, appears very simple. They are not inflected for case, gender, nor do adpositions indicate their directional or positional relationships.  Number is distinguished only in pronouns. Nevertheless, the nominal system has a complex hierarchy of animacy, which although unmarked, is a semantic feature of the noun and pronoun. This hierarchy of animacy is used to determine the syntactic roles of the core arguments of a clause, namely that of Agent and Patient.  Arguments that are higher in the Animacy Hierarchy are by default considered Agents, whereas lower animacy arguments are considered Patients.  If the syntactic roles of two core arguments are reversed, namely a lower animacy argument acts as an Agent on a higher animacy Patient argument, a special construction known as the Inverse Voice, involving the prefix ''tā-/ta-'', is added to both the first verb in the verb phrase and the auxiliary verb ''itá'''.  Thus, the Inverse Voice is doubly-marked.