Orthographic and Other Conventions

b. Da-bode-da-bo. I-fishhook-NOUN.VERBALIZER-CONT ‘I am fishing with a line and hook.’ Arawak words may be divided into four classes based on the distribution of those words in larger structures and based on internal inflectional differences. These classes are the fol- lowing: nominals, verbs, postpositions, and functors. 1. Nominals are those words which, without accompanying words other than articles, may serve as subject or object of a verb, or as object of a postposition. They may be inflected for number but not for aspect or tense. For example: wadili and siba in Li wadili dykha siba-be . the man see stone-PL ‘The man saw stones’. 2.Verbs are those words which, without accompanying words, may serve as predicate of a clause. 8 They may be inflected for aspect and tense but not for number. For example: dalhida in Li wadili dalhida-bo. the man run-PRES ‘The man is running’. Verbs in Ara- wak also include words expressing concepts which, in English, would be expressed by adjectives. For example: firo in Firo-ka no. big-PERF it ‘It is big e.g. the house’. 3. Postpositions may not serve as the subject or object of a clause, and may not serve as the predicate unless they are inflected with tenseaspect suffixes. 9 Some exam- ples of postpositions are the following: loko ‘inside of’, diako ‘on top of’, and oma ‘with accompaniment’. 4. Functors are those words which may not serve as predicate, subject, or object of a clause and may not be inflected for number, tense, or aspect. This definition is a negative one and is set up primarily for descriptive convenience. They do, however, share one feature: none of them can receive any of the pronoun prefixes or suffixes while nominals, verbs, and postpositions all can. Functors are all members of closed subclasses such as articles, conjunctions, and adverbials. For example: to ‘the’, ken ‘and’, hibin ‘already’.

2.3 Nominals

The nominals of Arawak may be subdivided into nouns and pronouns. Nouns, except proper nouns, may receive a possessor prefix, while pronouns may not: 6 Common Noun Proper Noun Pronoun da-sikoa Adajali de my-house ‘God’ ‘I’ ‘my house’ The pronouns are discussed first since they exemplify in a clearer fashion some of the dis- tinctions in number and gender that are also made among the nouns.

2.3.1 Personal Pronouns

Arawak pronouns are differentiated as to gender, person, humanness, and number. There are both personal and demonstrative pronominal forms. Grammatical case roles e.g. 2.3 Nominals 11 8 Nouns phrases may also be used predicatively, but only in attributive stative sentences. See Section 3.2.3.1. 9 See Section 2.5.1 for a discussion of the lexical status of postpositions and some reasons why they should be considered as distinct from both verbs and nominals.