Guarani/Grammar

Overview

No gender, no definite article (although lo and la from Spanish are sometimes used). Nouns are differentiated from other word classes by their ability to take the following morphemes: -kue (e.g., oga-kue 'former house'), -rã 'nominal future' (e.g., oga-rã house'), -kuéra 'plural' (e.g., mitã-kuéra 'children'), -eta 'a multitude of (e.g., mitã-ita 'a multitude of children), ko 'this' (e.g., ko-mita 'this child'), and pe 'that' (e.g., pe-mitã 'that child'). [1] Guarani seems not have a well-defined class of adjectives since there is no morphological process or syntactic behavior that can be uniquely associated with forms indicating properties. Morphologically, adjectives behave either as nouns or most commonly as intransitive predicators. [2]

Tense Morphemes

One interesting aspect of Guarani is the use of a tense morpheme to mark verb tense. Rather than having different verb conjugations to indicate tense, Guarani uses several affixes to indicate tense.

Guarani Present Tense

This section will cover the conjugation for Guarani verbs in the present tense. There are two main classes for Guarani verb stems: areal, and chendal. There is also a the stem aireal, which is usually considered a subclass of areal.