This article provides a grammar sketch of the Miskito language, the language of the Miskito people of the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and Honduras, a member of the Misumalpan language family. There also exists a brief typological overview of the language that summarizes the language's most salient features of general typological interest in more technical terms.
Contents
Phonemes
Suprasegmentals
Word stress is generally on the first syllable of each word.
Ligature
Ligature is a useful term (with precedents in other languages) for describing a grammatical feature of Miskito traditionally referred to with less accuracy in the Miskito context as 'construct'. A ligature is a morpheme (often -ka) which occurs when a noun is linked to some other element in the noun phrase. In Miskito, most of the elements that require the presence of ligature are ones that precede the head noun:
Ligature takes a variety of forms:
Some nouns take no ligature morpheme; these mostly denote parts of the body (e.g. bila 'mouth', napa 'tooth', kakma 'nose') or kinship (e.g. lakra 'opposite-sex sibling'), although there is only an imperfect correlation between membership of this morphological class and semantic inalienability (see also relationals below).
Pronouns and adverbs
The personal pronouns differentiate three persons and also have an exclusive/inclusive distinction in the first person plural. The general plural morpheme nani is added to form plurals (except with yawan). Use of these pronouns is optional when person is indexed in the possessed form, relational or verb group.
The pronouns are not case-specific, and may, under comparable conditions, be marked by the same postpositions as other noun phrases.
Relationals
Relationals are quasi-nouns expressing some relationship (often spatial) to their possessor complement. Many of the relationals perceivably originate in locatives (in -ra) of nouns designating parts of the body employed metaphorically to convey spatial or other relations.
Overview
Finite forms include several tenses and moods, in each of which the person (but not number) of the subject is marked by suffixes. The tenses themselves have characteristic suffixes which combine with the subject-indexing suffixes.
In addition to synthetic (simple) tenses, there is also a considerable range of periphrastic (compound) tenses. These are formed with a non-finite form of the main verb followed by an auxiliary verb.
Some of the synthetic tenses represent original periphrastic tense structures that have become welded into single words. This helps to explain why there are two different forms each in the present, past and future. (The sample verb used is pulaia 'play', stem pul-, given here in the third-person form of each tense.)
In addition to a subject index which form part of a verb's suffix, for transitive verbs the verb group includes an object index in the form of a preverbal particle marking the person (but not the number) of the object. The subject markers vary somewhat according to the tense, but the most usual forms are shown in the following table (see below for more details).
Conjugation
The stem of a verb is obtained by removing the -aia suffix from the infinitive. Most verb stems end in a consonant, and are conjugated as follows (our sample verb is pulaia 'play').
Verbs whose stems end in i (bri- 'have', wi- 'tell', pi- 'eat', di- 'drink', swi- 'allow') vary from the above paradigm in a few minor points. Bal-aia 'come' and w-aia 'go', have an irregular Present I tense. The verb yabaia 'give' is anomalous in a different way by having irregularly derived non-third-person object-indexing forms. Finally, the most irregular verb of all is the defective and irregular kaia 'to be'.
Periphrastic tenses
The range of aspectual, modal and other notions that can be expressed is enlarged considerably by the availability of various periphrastic constructions in which a verb acting as auxiliary is placed after the main verb. The conjugated component can take a variety of tenses, including periphrastic ones, and the periphrases themselves may often be combined; thus chains of several auxiliaries are possible. Some representative examples of such periphrases follow:
Propositional structure
While no systematic case marking differentiates formally between subjects and objects, there exist (apart from word order) certain option for achieving disambiguation.
Information structure
A system of specialized postpositions is used to identify topics and focused constituents:
Valency
Most verbs are built up from a monosyllabic lexical root ending in a vowel or a single consonant, to which an extension or stem consonant is very often added. The extensions correlate with transitivity: transitive stems have either -k- or -b- (unpredictably), while intransitive stems have -w-. There is also a valency-decreasing verb-prefix ai- which, added to transitive stems, produces unergative, reflexive, reciprocal or middle verbs. See the section on Derivation (below) for examples.
Relative clauses
There are two major constructions which may be used to form relative clauses in Miskito, the 'external head' strategy and the 'internal head' strategy.
General
As regards origin, the Miskito lexicon consists of the following principal components:
Derivation
Some derivational affixes: