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Jiwarli Verb Morphology
and Conjugations |
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There are two kinds of suffixes that can mark a verb in Jiwarli - inflectional suffixes, and derivational suffixes. Inflectional suffixes give extra grammatical information about the verb (eg. tense, mood and aspect) without changing the basic meaning or semantic information of the verb. Derivational suffixes carry out other functions, such as changing the transitivity of a verb (an intransitive verb has only a subject, eg. ‘I sleep’, whereas a transitive verb has both a subject and object eg. ‘I threw the ball.’), or changing a verb into a noun.
Many suffixes in Jiwarli, especially inflectional suffixes, have different allomorphs which means that although the suffix, or morpheme has different forms, those forms have the same function or meaning. For example, the past participle morpheme in English has various allomorphs, including -ed and -en, as in:
- He has selected a cake.
- He has eaten the cake.
In addition, verbs in Jiwarli belong to one of five conjugations. The allomorph that is used on a verb depends on which conjugation that verb belongs to.
More detailed descriptions of these 2 different types of morphology and how they relate to the verb conjuagtions can be found in:
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