Otomi Language - Grammar

Grammar

The morphosyntactic typology of Otomi displays a mixture synthetic and analytic structures. Particularly the phrase level morphology is synthetic, whereas the sentence level is analytic. Simultaneously, the language is head-marking in terms of its verbal morphology, while its nominal morphology is more analytic.

According to the most common analysis, Otomi has two kinds of bound morphemes, proclitics and affixes. Proclitics differ from affixes mainly in their phonological characteristics - they are marked for tone and block nasal harmony. Some authors consider proclitics to be better analyzed as prefixes . The standard orthography writes proclitics as separate words, whereas affixes are written joined to their host root. Most affixes are suffixes and with few exceptions occur only on verbs, whereas the proclitics occur both in nominal and verbal paradigms. Proclitics mark the categories of definiteness and number, person, negation, tense and aspect - often fused in a single proclitic. Suffixes mark direct and indirect objects as well as clusivity (the distinction between inclusive and exclusive "we"), number, location and affective emphasis. Historically, as in other Oto-Manguean languages,, the basic word order is Verb Subject Object, but some dialects tend towards Subject Verb Object word order probably under the influence of Spanish . Possessive constructions use the order possessed-possessor but modificational constructions use modifier-head order.

From the variety of Santiago Mexquititlan, Queretaro, an example of a complex verb phrase with four suffixes and one proclitic is:

Bi=hon-ga-wi-tho-wa

"He/she looks for us only (around) here"

In this example the initial Proclitic bi marks the present tense and the third person singular, the verb root hon means "to look for", the -ga- suffix marks a first person object, the -wi- suffix marks dual number, and tho marks the sense of "only" or "just" whereas the -wa- suffix marks the locative sense of "here".