Some Terminology
Verb
Verbs in Dena'ina can express three things: actions (like run, shout, or eat), states (like lie down, sit, or stand up), and qualities (be big, be strong, or be red).
English verbs usually cannot express qualities; there is a separate word class for that called adjectives. Because of that, Dena'ina verbs expressing qualities are sometimes called adjectival verbs.
Morpheme
Words can consist of several distinct parts. These parts are called morphemes. An example for this is the English verb form speaks. It consists of two morphemes, speak and s.
A morpheme always carries some meaning. In our example, the morpheme speak tells you which action is going on, while the morpheme s tells you that someone else (he or she) is performing the action.
English words have a fairly simple structure and usually do not consist of more than three or four morphemes. Dena'ina verbs, on the other hand, can easily contain as many as ten morphemes, somtimes even more.
Stem
The stem is the part of the verb that carries the main information about the action. The Dena'ina verb stem is usually found at the end of a verb (we will learn about exceptions later).
It is important to know that the stem is not invariable in Dena'ina. It can change because of several factors. One of them is tense. For the Dena'ina verb 'eat', the stem for the present tense is qat, and the stem for the past tense, qet'. Some verbs have a different stem for the future, too. Some verb stems also change with the number of people performing the action. If one or two people are walking, the verb stem for the present tense is yu, but it it's a whole bunch of people, the stem dał is used.
Prefix
A prefix is a morpheme that cannot occur on its own; it has to attach to a ->Stem. It always precedes a stem (hence the term prefix, as opposed to suffix, which is a morpheme that follows the stem).
Dena'ina verbs usually consist of quite a few prefixes and one stem.
Person
The category Person refers to who is performing the action. If the speaker (I) is performing, the action, it is called first person. Second person means that the addressee (you) is performing the action, and third person, that someone else, neither speaker nor addressee, is performing the action.
Dena'ina verbs are marked for person. A verb form in the first person looks different than a verb form in the second person.
Linguists always use the following order to display Person:
- First person
- Second person
- Third person
Number
The category Number refers to how many people are performing the action. In Dena'ina, this is a three-way distinction: singular (one person; abbreviated with Sg.), dual (two persons, abbreviated with Dl.), and plural (three or more persons, abbreviated with Pl.). English only distinguishes singular and plural.
Not all verbs in Dena'ina distinguish all three numbers. Most of them only distinguish singular and plural. The order in listing number is always singular (dual) plural.
Paradigm
If you conjugate a verb properly for ->Person and ->Number, you will get a paradigm, a set of related verb forms.
Paradigms are listed like this:
First person singular
Second person singular
Third person singular
First person dual
Second person dual
Third person dual
First person plural
Second person plural
Third person plural