The morphology of Dapnant is quite regular, although traditional accounts do not fully reflect that regularity. Dapnant is generally agglutinative though some morphemes may reflect combined forms of earlier morphemes. Grammatical affixes are mostly suffixes, with a few infixes and a few discontinuous morphemes (in the form of prefix-suffix pairs).
Most derivational morphology, however, uses prefixation, so that Dapnant does not have a single consistent type of affixation. Morphological variation occurs for both verbs and nouns. Verbal inflections represent aspect, voice and tense information. Not all verb roots take all inflections, since some are semantically inappropriate. The exact set of semantic/syntactic verb classes is still not fully clear.
A fully inflected verb has slots for the following categories of information:
The morphological tense system is very simple, divided into past and non-past forms. Adverbial phrases were frequently used to establish reference points in time, and in later texts, auxiliary verbs could also be used with participial forms to create a system of compound tenses. Even at a very late date, additional tense information was used mainly to create refence points that would change the meaning of subsequent past-non-past distinctions.
The voice system of Dapnant is a little unusual in that the voices solely control the argument structure of verbal case assignments. Except for a special closed class of verbs, Dapnant only allows embedded clauses, and the referent of relative clauses to occupy the subject position, so that these forms may or may not indicate a shift of focus, depending on the sentence. Dapnant has the following voices:
Dapnant has a relatively large set of aspectual distinctions, and, as might be expected, these often subtly affect the relative temporal significance of verb forms.
Verbs are not inflected to mark the person or number of their arguments, but it is legitimate for a Dapnant verb-phrase to have "echo-pronouns" following the verb. These do not repeat the directional particles, but appear in a fixed order (Subject/Object/Indirect object). In later texts, these "echo-pronouns" became very common, and if the City had not been destroyed, they might well have evolved into mandatory clitic pronouns or affixes.
Dapnant verbs take a series of suffixes to indicate morphological distinctions, except that the non-past tense particle is infixed. We shall follow the convention of citing verbs with a hyphen at the point of infixation.
Here you can find tables of some typical Dapant verbal forms. A note on the tables: Two forms of each verb are given -- the first line is the underlying representation of the verb form, according to my analysis, and the second line is its surface manifestation, with stress indicated and stress-induced vowel mutation carried out.
The traditional analysis of Dapnant verbal forms treats the structure rather differently. For instance, many classes of verbs with mutable vowels are distinguished. Perhaps the details of the native analysis can be presented at a later time.
Many verbs, naturally, fail to take all values of voice, because their argument structures don't contain the prerequisite roles for a voice's transformation. However, quite frequently some verbs will take a voice that seems inappropriate to the argument structure of the core meaning of the root, generating forms with a different core meaning. For instance, the passive of intransitive/predicative verbs is productively used in a causative sense. Other similar instances include (...something...), but generally have more idiosyncratic meanings. Thus some verbs are esentially split along semantic lines by their morphological voice markings. Sometimes subsequent semantic drift has completely obscured the original relationship of the senses so combined in a single verb.
Dapnant forms participles on stems that are fully marked for aspect and voice, but not for tense. The participial infix, in fact, behaves morphologically like another tense. Participles always refer to an action as it relates to a particular case-role in the verb; for instance a parcipial form will indicate a participial notion like "someone's act of killing" versus, "the act of someone's being killed". When it is desired to express the notion of an action in itself, the reflexive voice may be used, (which makes "killing" and "suicide" homonymous). However, more frequently, a derivational prefix is used to indicate an abstract active participle with _indefinite subject_, with the actual focus being on the verbal action, in this case. The implied case role is always the subject, as with the other cases of subordinated elements. The voice of the participial form determines which semantic role occupies the subject position.
Participles are always declined as C2 class nouns. The implied subject of a participial form can be indicated by a modifying noun in the posessive case. Unlike the voices of tensed verbs, it is not possible to manifest the other roles of the underlying verb. For some idiomatic verbs, this can introduce considerable ambiguity due to the presence of only one directional marker. This issue is discussed further in the sections on syntax, once the proper establishing information has been introduced.
The inability to express any either direct or indirect objects in participial forms means that such forms can be used to move other semantic roles into the background, by reducing their syntactic position in the sentence.
Directional prefixes are discussed elsewhere, but participles take a directional prefix that expresses the relation of the syntactic subject of the participle to the core verb. In cases where a verbal meaning is affected by more than once of the directionals used with a stem, ambiguity results. The controlled use of such ambiguity is a valued feature of Dapant's "high-literary" register. Here you can find tables of some typical Dapant participial verbal forms
Any verbal form can be negated by the prefixation of the derivational
prefix "pak-". I refer to negation as a derivational prefix because it
need not occupy a fixed position with respect to other derivational
prefixes, and indeed, can (rarely) occur more than once in a complex
derived form, though typically only where a frequently used term including
pak- has become lexicalized.
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