Pam Munro's Intro to Grammatical Analysis
presented at Breath of Life 2006 - Part C

A Project for Later

Find some sentences in your languages that describe qualities with adjectival ideas. Do they use a form of 'be' (as in English)? Or do the "adjective" words work like verbs (as in Garifuna, Tolkapaya Yavapai, and Chickasaw)? (Some languages may use both approaches, and there are other possibilities too...!

      Sentence (104), the caption for the second picture, looks like the earlier Garifuna sentences you saw with both a subject and an object (it has lumúti after the first verb), but sentence (103) is different – its second word is tumúti.

103. Éiha tumúti surúsiya. 'The (female) doctor looks at it'

104. Éiha lumúti surúsiya. 'The (male) doctor looks at it'

      Unlike most other American Indian languages, Garifuna has gender – a distinction between masculine and feminine nouns. Gender in Garifuna works much more like gender in Spanish (for example) than gender in English, because every noun in Garifuna is treated as either masculine or feminine.

      Recall the type of Garifuna verbs we've seen up till now. There are verbs like Amáligihati 'He swims', that have one word, and verbs like Éiha lumúti 'He sees it', which have two. Here are some more examples of sentences with the first type of verb:

105. Amáligahatu. 'She swims'

106. Amáligahatu mútu.'The woman swims'

107. Amáligahatu óunli. 'The (female) dog swims'

108. Ayáhuwati surúsiya. 'The (male) doctor cries'

109. Ayáhuwatu surúsiya. 'The (female) doctor cries'

As you can see, you can only understand the interpretation of nouns like mútu, óunli, and surúsiya when you see them used in sentences. Like the English word doctor, they can be used to refer to either males or females. (This is true of almost all Garifuna nouns referring to living creatures. Nouns referring to inanimates have only one gender.)

      So here are our two groups of the Garifuna verbs we've seen:

            one-word verbs                       amáligahati/amáligahatu 'swims'
            ayáhuwati/ayáhuwatu 'cries'

            two-word verb phrases           éiha lumúti / éiha tumúti 'sees'
                                                            áluaha lumúti 'looks for'
                                                            ídaagua lumúti 'helps'

What's the difference?

      The difference is that amáligahati and ayáhuwati are verbs that have subjects, but no objects, while eiha lumúti, áluaha lumúti, and ídaagua lumúti are verbs that have both subjects and objects. (There are common technical terms for these two types of verbs – a verb that does not have an object is considered intransitive, while a verb that has an object is transitive.)

      Umú is an auxiliary that is used only in sentences that have both subjects and objects, in other words, in transitive sentences. (It's not clear what it means – maybe something like "I am in a transitive sentence"!) Like various other Garifuna verbs and auxiliaries, umú is used with an l- prefix if its subject is masculine, and with a t- prefix if its subject is feminine.

      You saw the –ti (masculine) and –tu (feminine) endings used to mark subjects with the intransitive verbs amáligahati and ayáhuwati, Now look at how these are used with transitive verbs:

110. Éiha lumúti mútu surúsiya. 'The man sees the (male) doctor'
                                               
111. Éiha tumúti mútu surúsiya. 'The woman sees the (male) doctor'
                                               
112. Éiha lumútu mútu surúsiya. 'The man sees the (female) doctor'
                                               
113. Éiha tumútu mútu surúsiya. 'The woman sees the (female) doctor'

The prefix on umú tells the gender of the subject. The ending –ti or –tu tells the gender of the object. But the verb éiha and the nouns mútu and surúsiya stay just the same in each sentence!

(One thing all this means is that sentences (103) and (104) are only correct if the thing that the doctors are looking at is masculine!….)

Here is a diagram like the ones we made earlier for Tolkapaya Yavapai, showing the structure of a Garifuna transitive sentence.

Verb    SubjectPrefix+ umú + ObjectEnding         Subject           Object       
                                                                                                     
Éiha       l                      -umú  -ti                        mútu           surúsiya                        
                                                                            
• Verbs often change to indicate objects as well as subjects. Chickasaw, Tolkapaya Yavapai, and Garifuna have 'me' and 'you' object markers on their verbs – we just don't have time to show this here! (If your language uses the Verb-Sentence Pattern, it almost certainly works the same – but so do some Particle Pattern languages. Pronoun Pattern languages generally indicate objects with separate pronoun words.

§ 10. Taking stock once more – what have we learned?

¶ Changes in verbs may indicate changes in the tense of a sentence.

¶ Verbs often change to show 'I', 'you', and other subjects (and also 'me', 'you', and other objects.

¶ Bare verbs often are used to show 'he', 'she', or 'it' subjects (as in Tolkapaya Yavapai and Chickasaw), though some languages have special forms corresponding to different 'he', 'she', and 'it' subjects (as in Garifuna).

¶ Bare verbs can often be used as commands, but not always.

¶ There are three basic patterns for indicating 'I', 'you', and 'he'/'she'/'it' subjects – the Verb-Sentence Pattern, the Pronoun Pattern, and the Particle Pattern.

¶ Verbs are often used to express adjectival concepts.

¶ Auxiliaries can be used in any sentence type to help express more complex sentence ideas.

¶ Translating is not necessarily a one-to-one operation.

• One word in one language may correspond to more than one word in another..

• Not every English word will have a translation in your language.

• Not every word in your language will be translated directly into English.

• There may be more than one way to express an English sentence in your language, and vice versa.

Part A || Part B || Part C

Glossary of Technical Terms Used in this Handout

• accusative : the case of an object in a sentence (among other possible uses)
• adjective : word used to tell a quality of the subject (such as tall in He is tall – in many American Indian languages, adjectival verbs are used instead of words like English adjectives)
• article : word like English the or Pima heg, used with a noun phrase
• auxiliary : helping verb
• bare : without any added prefixes or endings
• basic word order : the most common or natural order speakers of a given language use for subject, verb, and object in a sentence
• case : a linguistic form associated with a particular grammatical role
• case marker : part of a word or phrase (most commonly a suffix) that identifies the grammatical role or case of that word or phrase in the sentence (the most common case markers identify subjects (nominative case) and objects (accusative case))
• command : sentence used to order someone to do something, usually indicated by the verb form and a special intonation
• future : the time after now (always indicated in some way in the sentence, though not always with a true tense marker)
• gender : grammatical identification of nouns as masculine or feminine (or other comparable categories), often based on actual sex but sometimes extended to nouns with no sexual characteristics
• intonation : the rhythm of the voice – particular intonation patterns are often associated with particular types of sentences
• inanimate : not living
• intransitive : having a subject but no object
• nominative : the case of a subject in a sentence (among other possible uses)
• noun : a name of a person, place, or thing
• O : object noun or noun phrase (in word order abbreviations such as VSO, SVO, or SOV)
• object : the person or thing that is affected by the action of the verb or toward which that action is directed
• past : the time before now (may be indicated with a special verb form, but sometimes not specifically marked)
• phrase : more than one word that functions as a unit (the man is an English noun phrase; looks for, will go, and is dancing are English verb phrases; áluaha lumúti is a Garifuna verb phrase)
• plural : referring to more than one
• present : the current time (may be indicated with a special verb form, but sometimes not specifically marked)
• pronoun : a word that can take the place of a noun if the speaker and hearer understand the situation (English examples include he, she, it, I, you, him, her, and so on)
• role : what role a noun plays in the sentence — for example, subject or object (also called "grammataical role")
• S : subject noun or noun phrase (in word order abbreviations such as VSO, SVO, or SOV)
• sentence : a report of a situation or state (however, questions and commands might also be considered sentences, and they are not "reports"…)
• singular : referring to just one
• subject : the person or thing that is doing the action or in the state named by the verb
• suffix : an ending (a suffix is something added to the end of a word, like English –ed or Chickasaw –at – normally, suffixes cannot be used by themselves, and only can appear at the end of a certain type of word or phrase)
• tense : the time that a verb refers to (present, past, future)
• transitive : with both a subject and an object
• V : verb or verb phrase (in word order abbreviations such as VSO, SVO, or SOV)
• verb : a word or phrase that tells the action or state a sentence is about
• word order : the order of words (or, often, smaller phrases) in a phrase or sentence, from left to right (or in the order in which you would say them)