The Navajo Verb: A Grammar for Students and ScholarsThe verb is the most important and the most complex part of Navajo grammar. For the first time, students and scholars interested in the Navajo language have a book that presents the verb system in a step-by-step and thorough fashion. By providing easy-to-follow descriptions with abundant examples, this book unravels the complexity of Navajo and reveals its expressiveness. In Navajo, numerous prefixes combine with verb roots to form single words that, in English translation, require a phrase or even a sentence to convey their meaning. Therefore, verb stems and prefixes must be mastered piece by piece to understand the language. This volume leads the reader carefully and systematically through the complexities of the Navajo verb system. By doing so, the book makes Navajo more accessible to all those interested in the American Indian language with the largest number of speakers in the United States.
"This work is outstanding for the way in which the materials and rules are organized."--Dr. Sally Midgette, coauthor of Analytical Lexicon of Navajo
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Contents
Background | 1 |
Introduction to the Verb | 6 |
The Modes Stemsets and Other Preliminaries | 14 |
Getting Started with the Imperfective Mode | 20 |
Fourth Person Subjects and Plural Subjects | 32 |
Classifiers and Introduction to Transitive Verbs | 40 |
Prefixless Verbs and More about Subject Prefixes | 52 |
Introduction to the Perfective More about Verb Bases and the sP Conjugation | 63 |
More and Back | 312 |
The Iterative Usitative and Optative Modes | 326 |
The Seriative | 340 |
The Progressive Mode | 362 |
The Reflexive Reciprocal and Passive | 369 |
Some Final Topics | 383 |
Conjugation Combinations | 384 |
Prestem Vowel Harmony | 386 |
Zero and Barred1 Classifiers | 81 |
Plainl and d Classifiers | 97 |
Object Prefixes for Transitive Verbs | 107 |
Unspec Object and 4 Person Object Prefixes Lexical Objects | 121 |
Voiced Fricative Verb Stems | 136 |
The Future Mode | 147 |
The Inner Prefix d and Outer Objects | 158 |
Some Irregular Verbs | 183 |
Introduction to Motion Verbs go and Verb Themes | 194 |
More about Motion Verbs and the nI and nP Conjugations | 215 |
More Outer Prefixes and More Motion | 235 |
The LongVowel Conjugations | 255 |
Those Pesky ns and the Conjunct High Tone | 283 |
Conjunct Prefixes | 388 |
Stemsets | 391 |
Prestem Syllable Effects | 397 |
Disjunct Prefixes | 398 |
Verb Bases and Verb Themes | 401 |
Vocabulary Principles | 403 |
Appendix | 407 |
Subject Prefixes | 416 |
Vocabulary Principles | 422 |
| 439 | |
| 445 | |