Grammar
See also: Classical Nahuatl grammarThe Nahuatl languages are agglutinative, polysynthetic languages that make extensive use of compounding, incorporation and derivation. That is, they can add many different prefixes and suffixes to a root until very long words are formed – and a single word can constitute an entire sentence.
The following verb shows how the verb is marked for subject, patient, object, and indirect object:
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- /ni-mits-teː-tla-makiː-ltiː-s/
- I-you-someone-something-give-
- "I shall make somebody give something to you" (Classical Nahuatl)
Read more about this topic: Nahuatl
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“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
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“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
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