Verbal Aspects:
Verbal aspects describe how the action of a verb occurs with respect to time.
- Perfective
Perfective aspect describes verbs that are finished with no sense of continuation or progression over time.
Ex: I walked. - Imperfective
Imperfective aspect describes verbs that show progression and the extension of action over time.
Ex: I was walking for an hour. - Frequentative
Frequentative aspect describes verbs of actions that are repeated.
Ex: I often walked.
Word Order:
Puyuma has a verb-initial word order, which means that the main verb comes before the subject and object of a sentence.
In English, we use a subject-initial word order, where we place the subject before the verb. For example, we would say: “The boy throws the ball”.
In Puyuma, the word-for-word equivalent could be “Throws the boy the ball.” With other morphological devices, a speaker would know who is doing the throwing, like with Austronesian Alignment.
Morphosyntactic Alignment:
Puyuma uses Austronesian Alignment (also known as Symmetrical Voice) to categorize nouns. See Austronesian Alignment for a more detailed description.
Types of Verb Focus:
- Actor focus
- Object focus
- Referent focus
- Instrumental focus