Morphology

This is a mandatory clausal category. Mood/evidence particles are inserted after the initial NP in a sentence and by this, they also indicate where a clause starts and secondarily, this marks the topic: the first NP in a sentence is the topic.

Tesяfkǝm uses the same evidence/mood system as Qþyn|gài.

Tense is optional.

Tense is relative (in subordinative clauses, the tense of the main clause is the default) and may be stacked to derive things like future-in-past tense, etc.

Aspect is usually mandatory. All nouns and verbs are stative by default. All basic lexicon entries are static, unary verbs, i.e., predicates. When verbs are used without modification as nouns, they denote a subset of entities for which the predicate is true. Examples: 'to be a dog' is a verbal lexicon entry and this used as a noun means 'dog'/'dogs'; 'to be blue' is a verb, the noun means 'a blue one'/'blue ones'. n-ary states (e.g. binary: 'to touch' in 'the table touches the wall') are expressed by clauses. The link between the noun-verb pairs is implicitly drawn by serial verb construction.

For forming events, derived words must be formed from stative lexicon entries using aspectual affixes.

Aspectual affixes may be dropped from verbs in an SVC if they are equal to preceding verbs that describe the same event.

Number is not grammaticalised. To express number, use 'many', 'few', 'one', 'two', 'zero' etc. together with the normal means of grammar to combine.

Tesяfkǝm distinguishes 7 'persons', the standard 3rd person being split:

'Pronouns' in Tesяfkǝm are actually noun derivations and thus affixes, so the term 'pronoun' is misleading and should not be used. There are no independent noun stems for pronouns. Instead, any noun may be modified with a pronominal affix, which is semantically an apposition ('human-1' would mean 'I/we, the human(s)'). What comes closest to neutral pronouns for human beings would be 'human-1', 'human-2', 'human-3', etc., or 'that-one-1' ..., i.e., the noun 'human' or a demonstrative modified with the respective pronominal ending. Of course, for referring to things, 'human' is not used, but different nouns are.

Tesяfkǝm is pro-drop, so often the pronouns affixes and even nouns are not used but must be inferred from context.

The possessive is expressed by using the modified noun in construct state. Forming the construct state is irregular, so both the absolute and the construct state are defined in the lexicon for each substantive.

The modifying noun directly precedes the modified.

Construct state is used only for inalienable possession. Tesяfkǝm has no alienable possession construction.

The inalienable possessive links two substantives to express an inherent part-of relation, which may be concrete ('his arm') or abstract ('his mind', 'his wisdom'). This operation is the only binary relation in Tesяfkǝm grammar.

Some words, e.g. body parts, only exist in construct state, there is no absolute state. So they cannot be used on their own but require a possessor. Other nouns lack the construct state, e.g. the word for 'God', which only has an absolute state.

For expressing alienable possessive, Tesяfkǝm uses a relative clause.

Modifiers of a construct state construction (e.g. relative clauses) always modify the construct state stem, i.e., the possessed, never the possessor.

In the special case when a possessor in a construct state construction is to be modified, special care has to be taken. You cannot directly express 'the big man's hat' in Tesяfkǝm but only 'the man's big hat': 'big-MOOD-REL man hat.CONSTR.'. To express 'the big man's hat', a juxtaposition with an anaphora is often use, e.g. 'big-MOOD-REL man this-3b-hat.CONSTR', lit.'the big man his hat'. This is no coordination, but uses the same syntactical structure. To prevent interpretation as modification, an explicit '-AND' infix has to be used for expressing coordination (e.g. for 'the big man and his hat').

Attributive verb constructions are expressed as relative clauses. E.g. 'The red car' = 'car-MOOD-red RES' or 'MOOD-red-REL car'.

No coordination particle needs to be used, the nouns may simply be juxtaposed. For emphasis and for expressing anything but 'and', use an infixed enclitic between the coordinated nouns.

See the section about construct state for an example of coordination that carries special meaning.

A sequence of verbs is interpreted like a serial verb construction. Otherwise, coordination works just like with nouns with infixed coordination particles.