Southern Athabascan Grammar - Typological Overview

Typological Overview

Typologically, Southern Athabaskan languages are mostly fusional, polysynthetic, nominative–accusative head-marking languages. These languages are argued to be non-configurational languages. The canonical word order is SOV, as can be seen in Lipan example below:

Kónitsąąhį́į́ dziłádałts’aa’híí áí daajiłdiił "The Lipan ate those wild grapes."

Subject = Kónitsąąhį́į́ "the Lipan"

Object = dziłádałts’aa’híí áí "those wild grapes"

Verb = daajiłdiił "they ate them"

Southern Athabaskan words are modified primarily by prefixes, which is uncommon for SOV languages (suffixes are expected).

The Southern Athabaskan languages are "verb-heavy" — they have a great ponderance of verbs but relatively few nouns. In addition to verbs and nouns, these languages have other elements such as pronouns, clitics of various functions, demonstratives, numerals, adverbs, and conjunctions, among others. Harry Hoijer grouped most of the above into a word class which he called particle based on the type of inflection that occurs on the word class. This categorization provides three main lexical categories (i.e. parts of speech):

1. verbs
2. nouns/postpositions
3. particles

There is nothing that corresponds to what are called adjectives in English. Adjectival notions are provided by verbs; however, these adjectival verb stems do form a distinct sub-class of verb stems which co-occur with adjectival prefixes.