2 articles tagués avec « Pragmatics »

U and WEI are “special” pronouns in Arusian, because they don’t behave like other words and personal pronouns. In this article, we will explain their functions and why they can be considered resumptive pronouns.

Resumptive pronouns are a category of pronouns that simply refer back to an element already mentioned before. They are quite common in languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Brazilian Portuguese. Although in Portuguese they are mostly optional, albeit common in speech, in Arabic and Hebrew they are mandatory in certain syntactic structures. In Arusian, the pronouns u and wei are also mandatory, as their omission can lead to ambiguity. Resumptive pronouns in Arusian allows you to make longer and more complex sentences.

This post aims to investigate how word order in Arusian, which is considerably freer than English, affects formality and characterises colloquial and formal registers.

INTRANSITIVE VERBS​

Arusian distinguishes transitivity and voice in verbs morphologically.

Intransitive verbs are characterised by the morphemes -a and -ei (depending on the voice). Later, we will see that they often function as nouns, and not as verbs. We will explain why this happens.