The Arden Reference Grammar

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Morphology of Nouns

Nouns inflect for case (primary and secondary), dependant cross-referencing and definiteness. There is no grammatical number, but a collective derivation may be employed in case of need. There are two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. Nouns whose stem ends in a consonant are masculine; nouns whose stem ends in a vowel are feminine.

There are three layers of declension: primary case, dependant cross-referencing and secondary case. Four primary cases are recognized: absolutive, genitive, dative and locative. They are marked by the following agglutinative suffixes:

Suffixes come in two variants, a front one and a back one, which are selected according to vowel harmony. For nouns that only contain the vowel /a/, the back allomorph is employed.

Dependant cross-referencing is marked through a set of enclitic bound pronouns which are common to nouns and verbs. Cross-referencing involves all of the nominal dependants in the genitive case and is mandatory. Secondary case is marked through postpositions. Definiteness is marked by means of regular stress shift, as explained below.

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