Morphological paradigms

Each lexical entry belongs to a lexical category (nouns, verbs, &c.). Each lexical category is associated with one or more paradigms, each of which has

• a name,
• a schema, which is a named tuple of grammatical categories,
• and a mapping that computes a set of strings (usually one) from an instance of the schema and the lexical entry.

For instance, the lexical category of nouns contains one paradigm named default with a schema of $(\text{case}:\text{Case},\text{number}:\text{Nnumber})$.

An instance of a schema is a named tuple, each of whose elements has a name identical to that of the corresponding element in the schema and a value in the set of values of the respective grammatical category. For example, $(\text{case}:\text{nominative},\text{number}:\text{dual})$ is an instance of the schema $(\text{case}:\text{Case},\text{number}:\text{Nnumber})$.

Given a lexical category $C$ consisting of $k$ paradigms $P_0=(n_0,{\sigma }_0,f_0),\dots ,P_{k-1}$, a lexical entry $L$ with a lexical category of $C$ consists of $k$ paradigm applications $A_0=(n_0,s_0),\dots ,A_{k-1}$, where $s_i=f_i(\cdot ,L)$ is a function mapping instances of ${\sigma }_i$ to a set of strings. For the noun ⟨ŋarâþ⟩, the default paradigm application maps $(\text{case}:\text{nominative},\text{number}:\text{dual})$ to $\{\text{ŋarac}\}$.

How exactly the mappings of paradigms are defined in Ŋarâþ Crîþ is described in Morphophonology.

Grammatical categories

A grammatical category consists of a set of two or more values. Grammatical categories are usually used as inputs to paradigm mappings but occasionally also appear as intrinsic properties of lexical entries.

Number

Ŋarâþ Crîþ has separate ideas of nominal and verbal numbers, which are often abbreviated as nnumbers and as vnumbers. Nominal numbers are used in the declension of nouns, while verbal numbers are used for agreement affixes in verbs and relationals. There are four verbal numbers: singular, dual, plural, and generic.

There are five nominal numbers: direct, dual, plural, singulative, and generic. No noun can decline for all five nnumbers; instead, each noun is limited to a subset of these according to its clareþ, which governs how nominal numbers map to verbal numbers:

• Singular nouns allow the direct (as a singular), the dual, the plural, and the generic.
• Collective nouns allow the direct (as a collective, usually corresponding to the plural vnumber, but sometimes to the singular vnumber when treated as a singular mass instead of a collection of individuals), the singulative (corresponding to singular vnumber), and the generic. The following nouns tend to be collective:
  • Objects that tend to be found in groups
  • Some plants, including all trees and flowers
  • Small animals
  • Diminuitive nouns
• Mass nouns allow only the direct (corresponding to singular vnumber) and the generic.

Generic number is used to mean “X in general” or “X as a concept”. It is used on noun phrases that do not refer to a specific referent or referents:

The generic number is also used for noun phrases that do not necessarily have a referent:

When a noun in the genitive case is used for description, it usually takes the direct number, not the generic.

A third-person pronoun in the generic number refers to a class of objects or people in general and can be translated as the English impersonal pronoun one. First-person and second-person generic pronouns act similarly, except that they include first-person or second-person referents. The use of generic-number pronouns is most notable in imperatives:

Case

Ŋarâþ Crîþ has eight cases (Table 1). The nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases are considered core cases. In general, the first three of these are used for arguments to verbs, the genitive case for adnominal adjuncts, and the other four cases for adnominal or adverbial adjuncts.

Gender

Ŋarâþ Crîþ has three genders or noun classes: celestial, terrestrial, and human. Gender is an intrinsic part of each noun; that is, the gender of each noun is fixed. The unmarked gender is celestial, in that noun phrases are assumed to be celestial unless otherwise specified, and the celestial gender is used for an object whose gender is otherwise unknown (such as in participles of headless relative clauses).

Many words agree with noun phrases in gender when they are inflected, including:

• third-person possessive clitics
• demonstrative determiners and pronouns
• finite verb forms in the gender of a third-person accusative or dative argument
• verb participles in genera I and III
• relationals in the gender of a third-person object
• long numerals from 1 to 6

Tense and aspect

Ŋarâþ Crîþ has two tenses: present (more precisely, nonpast) and past. In addition to the present, the present tense covers the future as well as the immediate past:

The present tense is also used as a narrative present: in stories, the past tense is used only for events that had happened before the current point.

Ŋarâþ Crîþ has two aspects: imperfective and perfective. The imperfective aspect is used for ongoing (such as progressive or habitual) actions.

Mood

Ŋarâþ Crîþ inflects for mood only on nominalized forms of a verb in certain cases. The mood distinction encodes a difference in modality in the dative and semblative cases only. In the locative, instrumental, and abessive, it encodes a distinction between adverbial and adnominal forms.

Attachment

Attachment refers to whether an adjunct is attached to a noun phrase or to a verb phrase. This is marked only on relationals, as well as nominalized forms of a verb in cases that use mood distinctions to signal attachment.

Conjunct forms

Each lexical element that can appear as the first element of a compound word has two conjunct forms. The consonantal conjunct form is a sequence of nonterminal syllables and is used before a non-vowel-initial word; the vocalic conjunct form is a stem that is used before a vowel-initial word.