Morphophonology and Morphology

As indicated earlier, there are three morphological classes of words:

• contentives (open class: the lexical words used to refer to the concepts being talked about in the utterance);
• inflecting function words (closed class; morphophonologically indistinguishable from contentives, but differing from the latters by having special effects on the surrounding syntax);
• indeclinable, uninflected function words, AKA particles (closed class).

Function words are closed classes, i.e. they have a limited, restricted membership, no new members are added to them, or only rarely.

In the language, function words are few, as many grammatical functions are expressed as inflection of contentive words.

We will proceed by examining the morphophonology of contentives (which is the same as that of inflecting function words), and a list of function words —together with their function— will be given afterwards.

Various example sentences will be shown as illustrations, accompanied by interlinear glosses. The glossing abbreviations used there are listed on the Grammemes page.