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59-495: The basic word order is subject–object–verb , like Latin and Japanese . Like other Niger–Congo languages , it has a noun class system, with nouns classified according to five different classes, which also affects pronouns , adjectives and copulas . The phonology features a distinction between the length of vowels and whether they are oral or nasal (as in French or Portuguese ). There are also three distinct tones ,

118-402: A desired scansion . Due to the presence of grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and in some cases or dialects vocative and locative) applied to nouns, pronouns and adjectives, Albanian permits a large variety of word order combinations. In the spoken language, an alternative word order to the most common S-V-O helps the speaker to emphasise a word and hence make

177-430: A feature shared with the other Senufo languages. Nafaanra grammar features both tense and aspect which are marked with particles . Numbers are mainly formed by adding cardinal numbers to the number 5 and by multiplying the numbers 10, 20 and 100. Nafaanra is bordered by Kulango languages to the west and southeast, while Deg (a Gur language ) is found to the north and east. The closest eastern and western neighbour

236-476: A general word order can be identified, but this is much harder in others. When the word order is free, different choices of word order can be used to help identify the theme and the rheme . Word order in Hungarian sentences can change according to the speaker's communicative intentions. Hungarian word order is not free in the sense that it must reflect the information structure of the sentence, distinguishing

295-499: A grammatically comprehensible sentence, but nonetheless archaic. There are some verbs, however, that are entirely acceptable in this format: This is acceptable to a modern English speaker and is not considered archaic. This is due to the verb "to be", which acts as both auxiliary and main verb. Similarly, other auxiliary and modal verbs allow for VSO word order ("Must he perish?"). Non-auxiliary and non-modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage ("Did he buy

354-539: A low tone nasal is found). In general however, downstep is more widespread than in Supyire; a similar phenomenon is found in Palaka, Tagwana, and Djimini. An upstep is found in the imperative tense of high tone verbs: ki it tɔ close ki tɔ it close "close it!" The Nafaanra syllable comprises a vowel and a maximum of three consonants. A nasal consonant may occur as a syllable on its own, in which case it

413-504: A means to emphasize a constituent in an independent clause by moving it to the beginning of the sentence. This is a defining characteristic of German as a V2 (verb-second) language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent. In closed questions, V1 (verb-first) word order is used. And lastly, dependent clauses use verb-final word order. However, German cannot be called an SVO language since no actual constraints are imposed on

472-487: A nuanced change to the meaning. For example: In these examples, " (mua) " can be omitted when not in first position, causing a perceivable change in emphasis; the latter being of different intensity. " Më " is always followed by the verb. Thus, a sentence consisting of a subject, a verb and two objects (a direct and an indirect one), can be expressed in six ways without " mua ", and in twenty-four ways with " mua ", adding up to thirty possible combinations. O'odham

531-474: A preferred or basic word order, with other word orders considered " marked ". Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb (V) in combination with two arguments, namely the subject (S), and object (O). Subject and object are here understood to be nouns , since pronouns often tend to display different word order properties. Thus, a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders: These are all possible word orders for

590-449: A raised exclamation mark) occurs in the following context: we he FUT sɛ go we sɛ he FUT go "he will go". It is likely that the tonal lowering seen in this particular example is related to the low tone nasal prefix found in future tense constructions in some other Senufo languages. In fact, Supyire shows a similar phenomenon in future tense constructions with a direct object (in other future tense constructions,

649-446: A relation with the southern Tagwana–Djimini branch. Nafaanra has seven oral and five nasalized vowels . A difference in vowel length can make a difference in meaning, as in sɛ , "to go", vs. sɛɛ , "fetish" or o , "we" vs. oo , "we will". Similarly, the phonemic contrastiveness of nasalization can be seen in sii , "to be giving birth," vs. sĩĩ , "to build". The vowel system closely resembles that of other Senufo languages. It

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708-677: A sentence is usually the topic, which may under certain conditions be marked by the particle " to " (तो / تو), similar in some respects to Japanese topic marker は (wa). Some rules governing the position of words in a sentence are as follows: Some of all the possible word order permutations of the sentence " The girl received a gift from the boy on her birthday ." are shown below. In Portuguese, clitic pronouns and commas allow many different orders: Braces ( { } ) are used above to indicate omitted subject pronouns, which may be implicit in Portuguese. Because of conjugation ,

767-598: A shift in a language's syntax, this is called syntactic change . An example of this is found in Old English, which at one point had flexible word order, before losing it over the course of its evolution. In Old English, both of the following sentences would be considered grammatically correct: This flexibility continues into early Middle English, where it seems to drop out of usage. Shakespeare's plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from this example: A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as

826-410: A statistical bias for SO order (or OS order in ergative systems; however, ergative systems do not always extend to the highest levels of animacy, sometimes giving way to an accusative system (see split ergativity ). Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders, such as Polish , Hungarian , Spanish , Latin , Albanian , and O'odham . In some languages,

885-400: A tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject. The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: The vast majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V, however, has been shown to be

944-504: A typical Niger–Congo noun class (or gender) system. Suffixes on nouns mark membership of one of the five noun genders. Pronouns, adjectives and copulas reflect the noun gender of the nominal they refer to. Although none of the sources on Nafaanra provides any details, it can be inferred from a brief word list given by Jordan that the Nafaanra noun class system resembles that of other Senufo languages. The basic word order in Nafaanra

1003-420: A very small number of adjectives that go after the heads, such as extraordinaire , which kept its position when borrowed from French.) Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation (шесть домов= six houses , домов шесть= circa six houses ). Some languages do not have a fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments. However,

1062-403: A very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders. In many languages, standard word order can be subverted in order to form questions or as a means of emphasis. In languages such as O'odham and Hungarian, which are discussed below, almost all possible permutations of a sentence are grammatical, but not all of them are used. In languages such as English and German, word order

1121-509: Is subject–object–verb , as can be seen in the following sentence: bibilɛ boys ná PAST pé them nya see bibilɛ ná pé nya boys PAST them see "The boys saw them" Jordan lists the following list of pronouns , commenting, "Although the pronoun system appears quite simple, it becomes complicated because all the tenses are shown by a combination of pronoun plus particle." Tense and aspect in Nafaanra are generally encoded in two places: in preverbal particles and on

1180-530: Is Andean Spanish, spoken in Peru. While Spanish is classified as an SVO language, Peruvian Spanish has been influenced by Quechua and Aymara, both SOV languages. This has led to some first-language (L1) Spanish speakers using OV word order in more sentences than would be expected. L2 speakers in Peru also use this word order. Palaka language Palaka (or 'Kpalaga') is a central Senufo language spoken by approximately 8,000 people in northern Ivory Coast . It

1239-503: Is a language that is spoken in southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico. It has free word order, with only the auxiliary bound to one spot . Here is an example in literal translation: Those examples are all grammatically valid variations on the sentence "The cowboy is branding the calves," but some are rarely found in natural speech, as is discussed in Grammaticality. Languages change over time. When language change involves

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1298-409: Is an echo question ; it would be uttered only after receiving an unsatisfactory or confusing answer to a question. One could replace the word wen [whom] (which indicates that this sentence is a question) with an identifier such as Mark : 'Kate liebt Mark ?' [Kate loves Mark ?]. In that case, since no change in word order occurs, it is only by means of stress and tone that we are able to identify

1357-553: Is bordered to the south by Djimini , a southern Senufo language, and to the west by Nyarafolo , another Senufo language. North and east of the Palaka area live Dioula people. Palaka constitutes a separate branch of the Senufo languages on its own, being rather different from them in morphology and phonology. It has been tentatively linked to Nafaanra language , an isolated Senufo language spoken in Ghana . Palaka has been separated from

1416-435: Is called a syllabic nasal . The basic syllable structure can be rendered as (C 1 )(C 2 )V(C 3 ), with a preference for CV and CVV. Position C 1 may contain any consonant, although word-initial /r/ does not occur. Position C 2 may contain only trills (/r/) or approximants (/w, l, j/). Position C 3 may contain only nasals ( /m n ɲ ŋ/ ), in which case the syllable as a whole is nasalized . Senufo languages have

1475-482: Is common. For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture) . On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has

1534-479: Is essentially a verb-final (SOV) language, with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions explicitly mark the relationships of noun phrases to the other sentence constituents. Word order in Hindustani does not usually encode grammatical functions. Constituents can be scrambled to express different information structural configurations, or for stylistic reasons. The first syntactic constituent in

1593-592: Is fairly similar to that of other Senufo languages. Nafaanra has only one attested palatal fricative, /ç/ , occupying an intermediate position between the Northern Senufo languages (Mamara, Supyire) that have both /ç/ and its voiced counterpart /ʝ/ , and the Central and Southern Senufo languages (e.g. Karaboro, Senari, Djimini) that have no palatal fricatives at all. Like the other Senufo languages, Nafaanra has three contrastive tones: High, Mid and Low. Tone

1652-406: Is found that previously given information ( topic ) tends to precede new information ( comment ). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have

1711-423: Is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking , agreement , or another marker . Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian . Observing discourse patterns, it

1770-590: Is like the two Northern Senufo languages Supyire and Mamara in having only five nasal against seven oral vowels. In the orthography, nasalization of vowels is marked by adding the letter "n" after the vowel. In the table below, orthographic symbols are included between angled brackets if they differ from the IPA symbols. Note especially the use of "j" for IPA [ɟ] and the use of "y" for IPA [j] , common in African orthographies. The consonant system of Nafaanra

1829-445: Is marked by the preverbal particle ná (high tone, as opposed to the low tone continuative particle). Future tense is marked by the particle wè . Simple sentences without a preverbal tense particle are interpreted as recent past (sometimes called immediate ). If aspect marking is absent, simple sentences are generally interpreted as completive . kòfí Word order In linguistics , word order (also known as linear order )

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1888-522: Is normally not marked in the Nafaanra orthography. Examples are: The Mid tone sometimes has a rising feature, the High tone sometimes is subject to downstep (a tonal process resulting in a High tone being realised lower than a preceding High tone), and an upstep is also found. The "rising feature" of Mid may be related to the fact that two different Mid tones are found in some other Senufo languages (e.g. Sucite and Supyire). The High tone downstep (signified by

1947-652: Is somewhat disputed in the community, as the languages where it occurs have one of the dominant word orders but every word order type is grammatically correct. The table below displays the word order surveyed by Dryer . The 2005 study surveyed 1228 languages, and the updated 2013 study investigated 1377 languages. Percentage was not reported in his studies. Hammarström (2016) calculated the constituent orders of 5252 languages in two ways. His first method, counting languages directly, yielded results similar to Dryer's studies, indicating both SOV and SVO have almost equal distribution. However, when stratified by language families ,

2006-704: Is the Mande language Ligbi . Southeast and south of Nafaanra and Ligbi, the Akan language Abron is spoken. The Nafana people live in the north-west corner of the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana, concentrated mainly in Sampa (capital of the Jaman North district) and Banda . There are two dialectal variants of Nafaanra: Pantera of Banda, and Fantera of Sampa. Bendor-Samuel gives a 79% cognate relationship on

2065-575: Is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses. Cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with

2124-712: Is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language . Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are Some languages use relatively fixed word order, often relying on the order of constituents to convey grammatical information. Other languages—often those that convey grammatical information through inflection —allow more flexible word order, which can be used to encode pragmatic information, such as topicalisation or focus. However, even languages with flexible word order have

2183-458: Is used as a means of turning declarative into interrogative sentences: A: 'Wen liebt Kate?' / 'Kate liebt wen ?' [Whom does Kate love? / Kate loves whom ?] (OVS/SVO) B: 'Sie liebt Mark' / 'Mark ist der, den sie liebt' [She loves Mark / It is Mark whom she loves.] (SVO/OSV) C: 'Liebt Kate Mark?' [Does Kate love Mark?] (VSO) In ( A ), the first sentence shows the word order used for wh-questions in English and German. The second sentence

2242-634: The Swadesh list between the two dialects, meaning that they have many basic words in common. The Banda dialect is considered central. The terms "Fantera" and "Pantera" come from other peoples and are considered pejorative by the Nafana. The Nafana people say that they come from a village called Kakala in Ivory Coast. Their oral history says that some of their people are still there, and if they go back they will not be allowed to leave again. They arrived in

2301-421: The grammatical person is recovered. In Classical Latin, the endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations. Latin lacks articles. The subject, verb, and object can come in any order in a Latin sentence, although most often (especially in subordinate clauses) the verb comes last. Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining

2360-462: The sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance. However, also in languages of this kind there is usually a pragmatically neutral constituent order that is most commonly encountered in each language. Topic-prominent languages organize sentences to emphasize their topic–comment structure. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin and Turkish, SOV

2419-715: The Banda area after the Ligbi people, who came from Begho (Bigu, Bighu) to the area in the early 17th century. According to Ethnologue , as of 2005, many Nafana are bilingual in Twi , the regional lingua franca , to some extent. Using the ILR scale , 50% of Nafana have limited working proficiency in Twi, while 20% have general professional proficiency. The remaining 30% have either elementary proficiency (15%) or no proficiency at all (15%). 15–25% of

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2478-518: The Nafana people are literate in Twi, whereas only 1–5% are literate in Nafaanra. 65 Dompo people living in the close vicinity of Banda have shifted to Nafaanra. Dompo is their first language, thought to be extinct until a fieldwork trip by Blench in 1998 proved the contrary. Maurice Delafosse was the first linguist to mention Nafaanra, calling it "a much dispersed Senufo tribe" in 1904. Westermann in his classification of West-African languages, also grouped Nafaanra with Senufo, apparently based on

2537-431: The action (verb) itself, as seen in sentences 1, 6 and 7, or it can be on parts other than the action (verb), as seen in sentences 2, 3, 4 and 5. If the emphasis is not on the verb, and the verb has a co-verb (in the above example 'meg'), then the co-verb is separated from the verb, and always follows the verb. Also the enclitic -t marks the direct object: 'torta' (cake) + '-t' -> 'tortát'. Hindi - Urdu ( Hindustani )

2596-577: The book?"). Shakespeare's usage of word order is not indicative of English at the time, which had dropped OV order at least a century before. This variation between archaic and modern can also be shown in the change between VSO to SVO in Coptic , the language of the Christian Church in Egypt. There are some languages which have different preferred word orders in different dialects. One such case

2655-512: The degree of marking alone does not indicate whether a language uses a fixed or free word order: some languages may use a fixed order even when they provide a high degree of marking, while others (such as some varieties of Datooga ) may combine a free order with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments. Typologically, there is a trend that high-animacy actors are more likely to be topical than low-animacy undergoers; this trend can come through even in languages with free word order, giving

2714-510: The distribution showed that the majority of the families had SOV structure, meaning that a small number of families contain SVO structure. Fixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents . This works because speech

2773-482: The echo question in ( A ) simply by restating: Mark! . This is the same for both languages. In yes–no questions such as ( C ), English and German use subject-verb inversion . But, whereas English relies on do-support to form questions from verbs other than auxiliaries, German has no such restriction and uses inversion to form questions, even from lexical verbs. Despite this, English, as opposed to German, has very strict word order. In German, word order can be used as

2832-406: The emphatic part that carries new information (rheme) from the rest of the sentence that carries little or no new information (theme). The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb, that is, nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb. For "Kate ate a piece of cake ", the possibilities are: The only freedom in Hungarian word order is that

2891-421: The non-Senufo languages Mo (or Deg), Kabre (or Kabiye) , and Dogon . The relatively low scores of about 60% point to a rather distant relationship. Likewise, Mensah and Tchagbale establish an intercomprehensibility factor of 38% with "Tyebaara" (Senari), concluding that Nafaanra is only distantly related to this dialect. Nafaanra has been tentatively linked to Palaka (Kpalaga) by Manessy , whereas Mills suggests

2950-824: The noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before and/or after the head noun . Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions ( in London ), postpositions ( London in ), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides) either separately ( For whom? or Whom for? ) or at the same time ( from her away ; Dutch example: met hem mee meaning together with him ). There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions . VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions . For SVO languages, either order

3009-425: The order of parts outside the focus position and the verb may be freely changed without any change to the communicative focus of the sentence, as seen in sentences 2 and 3 as well as in sentences 6 and 7 above. These pairs of sentences have the same information structure, expressing the same communicative intention of the speaker, because the part immediately preceding the verb is left unchanged. The emphasis can be on

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3068-478: The order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question: Latin prose often follows the word order "Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Adverb, Verb", but this is more of a guideline than a rule. Adjectives in most cases go before the noun they modify, but some categories, such as those that determine or specify (e.g. Via Appia "Appian Way"), usually follow the noun. In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve

3127-420: The placement of the subject and object(s), even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed (such as putting the subject after the finite verb in independent clauses unless it already precedes the verb ). The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause . Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within

3186-415: The rather uncommon VOS word order. However, they are ergative–absolutive languages , and the more specific word order is intransitive VS, transitive VOA, where the S and O arguments both trigger the same type of agreement on the verb. Indeed, many languages that some thought had a VOS word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan. Every language falls under one of the six word order types; the unfixed type

3245-477: The sentence as a question. In ( B ), the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in ( A ). The second sentence emphasizes that Kate does indeed love Mark , and not whomever else we might have assumed her to love. However, a sentence this verbose is unlikely to occur in everyday speech (or even in written language), be it in English or in German. Instead, one would most likely answer

3304-607: The subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "she" as the subject, "loves" as the verb, and "him" as the object): Sometimes patterns are more complex: some Germanic languages have SOV in subordinate clauses, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO. Many synthetic languages such as Latin , Greek , Persian , Romanian , Assyrian , Assamese , Russian , Turkish , Korean , Japanese , Finnish , Arabic and Basque have no strict word order; rather,

3363-434: The symbol "S" being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and "A" for the actor/agent of a transitive clause. ("O" for object may be replaced with "P" for "patient" as well.) Thus, Russian is fixed AVO but flexible SV/VS. In such an approach, the description of word order extends more easily to languages that do not meet the criteria in the preceding section. For example, Mayan languages have been described with

3422-443: The verb form. Nafaanra has past, recent past, and future tenses and continuative aspect. In a simple sentence, the order of the various constituents can be rendered as follows: SUBJECT • (NEGATION) • (TENSE) • (ASPECT) • VERB . When the negative suffix -n is present, no fusing of preverbal particles takes place. Nafaanra additionally expresses some tense/aspect matters by use of certain time adverbs and auxiliary verbs. Past tense

3481-618: The word list found in Rapp. This classification is confirmed by Bendor-Samuel, who bases his internal Senufo classification on the comparative word lists in Swadesh et al. It is less clear which particular Senufo branch Nafaanra is most closely related to. Bendor-Samuel gives a 60% cognate relationship based on the Swadesh list with "Tenere" (a western Senari dialect), 59% with "Central Senari" (the Senari dialect spoken around Korhogo), and 43% with

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