Arskovaa grammar

Nouns

Animacy

All nouns belong to one of two grammatical genders, animate or inanimate. Which class a noun belongs to affects both its own inflection and that of any verbs which must agree with it. The gender a given noun is assigned is usually based on pure semantics. The majority of animate nouns denote people or animals while most inanimate nouns denote objects. There are however nouns whose class is counter-intuitive. Animacy is also key to the language's system of honorifics. A typically inanimate noun may be treated as animate to express respect and an animate noun may be treated as inanimate to express humility.

Case

The morphosyntactic alignment of case marking in nouns is typically absolutive-ergative. Some sentences with a first or second person argument are an exception. There are five cases, the absolutive, ergative, genitive, dative and instrumental. Case is indicated by suffixation, except for the absolutive case, which is always unmarked. The suffixes for the remaining four cases are wholly different for animate and inanimate nouns.

Absolutive

The absolutive is the most basic case. It is unmarked for both animate and inanimate nouns and is used as the citation form of nouns. Its primary grammatical functions are marking the sole argument of an intransitive verb and marking the patient of a transitive verb. It is also sometimes used to mark the agent of a transitive verb. This occurs only when the agent is a first or second person pronoun and the verb is in the direct construction (see Verbs: Agreement).

Ergative

The compliment to the absolutive case is the ergative case. It is primarily used to mark the agents of transitive verbs, except when the agent is a first or second person argument and the verb uses a direct construction. In these cases the absolutive case is used instead.