Wintu Language - Syntax

Syntax

The basic word order in Wintu is very flexible. A morphological word is the basic syntactical unit. In some cases a morphological word that is phonemically a single word can be syntactically two different words. A morphological word,can be clitic or non clitic. The clitic word, is always dependent on the non-clitic. The clitic words can be proclitic and postclitic depending on their position. Some morphemic words can be both clitics and full words. For example: the morphemic word / ʔel/, in, is both a full word in /qewelʔel/, in the house, and a proclitic in /ʔel-qewel/, which have the same meaning. The largest syntactic unit is the sentence. Sentences are considered a sequences of full words terminated by a period juncture /./. The sentence can be considered a clause if it contains verbs, sentence if it contains nouns. Sentences never contains main verbs. Clauses can be dependent or independent. This depends on the kind of suffix who forms the verb. Independent verbs take the personal inflectional suffixes while dependent verbs are characterised by the subordinating suffixes{r},{tan},{ʔa], {n},}{so}, and {ta}. In the sentences the syntactic relationships between full words and clitics are indicated by the word order and by the inflectional and derivational suffixes. Four types of functions can be distinguished for the sentences: head, attributive, satellite, and conjunction. The head is usually a noun and it is not dependent on other forms as for example /winthu/Wintu people. The attributive preceded and modify the head as for example in /winthu•n qewelin/ in a Wintu house. On the other hand, the satellite only occurs in clauses. A satellite could be either the subject or the object of a verb. If the satellite is the subject of the verb, it precedes the verb, as for example /po• m yel-hura/land destroyed, but if the satellite is the object and it is in a dependent clause or a noun-phrase containing a genitive attributive, follows. For example: /sedet ʔelew'kiyemti•n/ coyote never speaks wisely, or /wayda me•m hina/ a northern flood of water (will) arrive.