Guarani/Grammar

Overview

The main grammatical categories of words in Guarani are nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, nominal postpositions, verbal postpositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Guarani does not keep track of gender and has 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. Verbs will be tagged with <v>. There are two main classes for Guarani verb stems: areal, which are active verbs, and chendal, which are stative verbs. There is also a the stem aireal, which is usually considered a subclass of areal. These will all be tagged with <ar>, <air>, and <chen>. We will mark present tense with <pres>. The person tag will be marked with <p1>, <p2> and <p3>. Additionally, verbs in Guarani distinguish between inclusive and exclusive for the first person plural, which we will mark with <incl> and <excl>, respectively.

«guata» ("walk") is an «areal» verb:

• guata<v><ar><pres><p1><sg> ↔ aguata
• guata<v><ar><pres><p2><sg> ↔ reguata
• guata<v><ar><pres><p3><sg> ↔ oguata
• guata<v><ar><pres><p1><pl><incl> ↔ jaguata
• guata<v><ar><pres><p1><pl><excl> ↔ roguata
• guata<v><ar><pres><p2><pl> ↔ peguata
• guata<v><ar><pres><p3><pl> ↔ oguata

«pyvu» ("beat") is an «aireal» verb:

• pyvu<v><air><pres><p1><sg> ↔ aipyvu
• pyvu<v><air><pres><p2><sg> ↔ reipyvu
• pyvu<v><air><pres><p3><sg> ↔ oipyvu
• pyvu<v><air><pres><p1><pl><incl> ↔ jaipyvu
• pyvu<v><air><pres><p1><pl><excl> ↔ roipyvu
• pyvu<v><air><pres><p2><pl> ↔ peipyvu
• pyvu<v><air><pres><p3><pl> ↔ oipyvu

«japu» ("lie") is an «chendal» verb:

• japu<v><chen><pres><p1><sg> ↔ che japu
• japu<v><chen><pres><p2><sg> ↔ nde japu
• japu<v><chen><pres><p3><sg> ↔ ijapu
• japu<v><chen><pres><p1><pl><incl> ↔ ñande japu
• japu<v><chen><pres><p1><pl><excl> ↔ ore japu
• japu<v><chen><pres><p2><pl> ↔ pende japu
• japu<v><chen><pres><p3><pl> ↔ ijapu