Catalan Grammar

Catalan grammar, the morphology and syntax of the Catalan language, is similar to the grammar of most other Romance languages. Catalan is a relatively synthetic, fusional language.

Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles inflected for gender (masculine and feminine), and number (singular and plural). The case system of the ancestor language, Latin, has been lost except in pronouns. Nouns and adjectives can take diminutive or augmentative derivational suffixes, and most adjectives can take a superlative derivational suffix. Adjectives usually follow the noun.

Verbs are highly inflected: there are three tenses (past, present, future), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), three aspects (perfective, imperfective, and progressive), two voices (active and passive). Most perfect and imperfect tenses are synthetic. As in other Romance languages, there is also an impersonal passive construction, with the agent replaced by an indefinite pronoun. Catalan is basically an SVO language, although SOV syntax may occur with a few object pronouns, and word order is generally freer than English. Catalan is a pro-drop language and has two copular verbs.

Some distinctive features of Catalan among Romance languages include the general lack of masculine markers (like Italian -o), a trait shared with French and Occitan); and the fact that the preterite tense of verbs is usually formed with a periphrasis consisting of the verb "to go" plus infinitive.

Read more about Catalan Grammar:  Articles, Nouns, Adjectives, Adverbs, Verbs

Famous quotes containing the words catalan and/or grammar:

    It’s better that it should make you sick than that you don’t eat it at all.
    Catalan proverb, quoted in Colman Andrews, Catalan Cuisine.

    The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.
    Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)