Contentives

The morphology of the contentive is an agglutinative template of five slots, described by the table below, starting with the first slot as the first row and ending with the last slot:

┌───┬────────────┬────────────────┐  
│ № │ Form       │  Name          │  
├───┼────────────┼────────────────┤  
│ 1 │ CV         │  Anchoring     │  
├───┼────────────┼────────────────┤  
│ 2 │ C(VG)V(ʼV) │  Role          │  
├───┼────────────┼────────────────┤  
│ 3 │ C(VG)V*    │  Extensions    │  
├───┼────────────┼────────────────┤  
│ 4 │ CV         │  Namespace     │  
├───┼────────────┼────────────────┤  
│ 5 │ CV(CV…)(C) │  Root or base  │  
└───┴────────────┴────────────────┘  

⟪C⟫ ≝ any consonant; ⟪V⟫ ≝ any vowel or diphthong; ⟪G⟫ ≝ any glide/semivowel.

(The asterisk means that the slot is optional and recursive, i.e. its may contain zero, one, two or more values strung together.)

Slot 1, 3 and 4 are optional; the other ones are mandatory.

However, the Role slot may further be subdivised into up to five further subslots when the word is inflected for certain syntactic functions (mainly functions others than that of main verb):

┌────┬───────┬──────────────────┐  
│ №  │ Form  │  Name            │  
├────┼───────┼──────────────────┤  
│ 2a │  C    │  Outer Case      │  
├────┼───────┼──────────────────┤  
│ 2b │ Vy/Vw │  Saliency        │  
├────┼───────┼──────────────────┤  
│ 2c │ Vʼ    │  Scope           │  
├────┼───────┼──────────────────┤  
│ 2d │ Vy/Vw │  Determinacy     │  
├────┼───────┼──────────────────┤  
│ 2e │ V     │  Inner Case      │  
│    │       │  / Subordination │  
└────┴───────┴──────────────────┘  

Out of these, slot 2b, 2c and 2d are optional; slots 2a and 2e must appear together.

The root or base of a contentive is always demarcated from the inflectional and extensional prefixes prepended to it by bearing the highest tone (represented by an acute accent in the Latin orthography) on its first syllable.
For example, in the word ⟪talóya⟫, the root is ⟪-lóya⟫, “sky”, and ⟪ta-⟫ is a slot #2 inflectional prefix complex.
A root must always be preceded by a slot #2 inflectional prefix syllable, optionally followed by one or more extensional prefixes (which are mostly monosyllabic, with limited disyllabic forms CVyV or CVwV (e.g. ⟪-kwıyu-⟫).
A slot #1 proclitic may precede the obligatory slot #2. The first syllable of a word can be unambiguously identified as belonging to slot #1 (as opposed to slot #2) by virtue of their having mutually exclusive sound forms: while ⟪θa꞊⟫ is a valid slot #1 syllable, it cannot be a slot #2 form; similarly, ⟪ta-⟫, a frequent slot #2 form, cannot possibly appear in slot #1.

The word ⟪ŋkaoluŋkıkwıyuráwa⟫ (“of the fact that we talked to each other”) can thusly be unambiguously parsed as the following string of components:

┌──────────┬────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────┐  
│ Slot #1  │ ŋ꞊     │ Injective clitic                            │  
│ Slot #2a │ k-     │ Accusative outer case                       │  
│ Slot #2e │ ao-    │ Plain content clause subordinator           │  
│ Slot #3  │ lu-    │ Extension: past tense                       │  
│ Slot #3  │ ŋkı-   │ Extension: “you and me” + (Ergative)        │  
│ Slot #3  │ kwıyu- │ Disyllabic extension (CVyV): “reciprocally” │  
│ Slot #5  │ -ráwa  │ Root: “talk with”                           │  
└──────────┴────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────┘  

We will now examine each of the slots one by one in reverse order, starting from the last one (the word base).