Navajo grammar

Navajo is a "verb-heavy" language – it has a great preponderance of verbs but relatively few nouns.

In addition to verbs and nouns, Navajo has other elements such as pronouns, clitics of various functions, demonstratives, numerals, postpositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, among others.

Navajo has no words that would correspond to adjectives in English grammar: verbs provide the adjectival functionality.

Verbs are composed of an abstract stem to which inflectional or derivational prefixes are added.

The theme is then combined with derivational prefixes that in turn make up the verb base.

Below is a table of a recent proposal of the Navajo verb template (Young & Morgan 1987).

In fact, most Navajo verbs are not as complex as the template might suggest: the maximum number of prefixes is around eight.

Navajo verbs have pronominal (i.e. pronoun) prefixes that mark both subjects and objects.

It has a number of uses including: When used as an impersonal, it may be translated into English as "one" as in béésh bee njinéego hálaʼ da jiigish "one can cut one's hand playing with knives".

An example paradigm for "to freeze" (imperfective mode) showing the subject prefixes: The "classifiers" are prefixes of position 9 (the closest to the verb stem) that affect the transitivity of the verb, in that they are valence and voice markers.

Navajo has a large number of aspectual, modal, and tense distinctions that are indicated by verb stem alternations (involving vowel and tonal ablaut and suffixation) often in combination with a range of prefixes.

Each Navajo verb generally can occur in a number of mode and aspect category combinations.

For example, the verb meaning "to play, tease" has the following five stem forms for the seven modes: The imperfective indicates an event/action that has begun but remains incomplete.

However, since the perfective mode is not a tense, it can be used to refer non-past actions, such as the future (where it may be translated as English "will have" + VERB).

The usitative indicates a repetitive event/action that takes place customarily: yishááh "I usually go", yishdlį́į́h "I always drink (something)".

With punctual verbs, the optative mode can be used to form a negative imperative: shinóółʼį́į́ʼ (lágo) "don't look at me!".

Thus, a given verb has a set of stem forms that can be classified into both a mode and an aspect category.

The patterns of verb stem alternations are very complex although there is a significant amount of homophony.

The eleven primary classificatory "handling" verb stems appear listed below (in the perfective mode): To compare with English, Navajo has no single verb that corresponds to the English word to give.

The stems may then be grouped into three different categories: Using an example for the solid roundish object (SRO) category, Navajo has: Like most Athabaskan languages, Navajo shows various levels of animacy in its grammar, with certain nouns taking specific verb forms according to their rank in this hierarchy.

Noun phrases are often not needed to form grammatical sentences due to the informational content of the verb.

When used as verbs, chʼéʼétiin may be translated into English as "something has a path horizontally out" and hoozdo as "place/space is hot".

[14] Plurality is usually encoded directly in the verb through the use of various prefixes or aspects, though this is by no means mandatory.

In the following example, (2) is used with the plural prefix da- and switches to the distributive aspect.

The prefixes are also used when the possessor in a possessive phrase is a noun, as in: JáanJohnbimáhis-motherJáan bimáJohn his-mother"John's mother"Navajo marks inalienable possession for certain nouns – relatives, body parts, homes and dens.

If one wishes to speak of mothers in general, the 3rd person indefinite prefix ʼa- "someone's" is used, amá.

All postpositions are inalienable, meaning that a prefix or fusion with a true noun is mandatory.

Occasionally, postpositions are fused with true nouns to form a single word, such as Dinétah.

Several changes occur when the -diin suffix is added involving a loss of the final consonant or a reduction in vowel length: For the cardinal numerals higher than 20 between the multiples of 10 (i.e., 21–29, 31–39, 41–49, etc.