Klallam Grammar Main Menu Klallam Grammar Alphabet and Sounds Basics Grammar Introduction: How to Use This Grammar 1 Transitive and Intransitive Verbs 2 Past and Future Tense 3 Basic Speech Acts 4 Nouns and Articles 5 Possessive Pronouns 6 Adjectives 7 Object Pronouns 9 Negative Words 10 More Negative Words 11 Self and Each Other 12 Questions: ‘Who?’ and ‘What?’ 13 Subordinate Subjects in Questions 14 Questions: ‘Whose?’ 15 Focus Pronouns and Answering Questions 16 Comparison 17 Conjunction: ‘And/with,’ ‘but/without,’ and ‘or’ 18 Questions: ‘When?’ 19 Time Expressions 20 More Time Expressions 21 Time Prefixes 22 Questions: ‘Where?’ 23 Some Place Expressions 24 Source, Way, and Destination 25 Serial Verbs 26 Questions: ‘How?’ and ‘How much?’ 27 While Clauses 28 Adverbial Expressions 29 Intensifier Auxiliaries 30 Conditional Clauses 31 Passive Sentences and Shifting Vowels 32 Lexical Suffixes 33 Collective Plural 34 Possessed Verbs 35 So Then ... 36 Reporting Verbs and Direct Quotes 37 Indirect Quotes 38 Questions: ‘Why?’ 39 Because 40 Cause 41 Speech Act Particles 42 The Actual: To Be Continuing 43 State, Result, and Duration 44 Participant Roles and Middle Voice 45 Recipient, Beneficiary, and Source Objects 46 Reflexive, Noncontrol Middle, and Contingent 47 Activity Suffixes 48 Relative Clauses 49 Verbal Prefixes 50 Movement and Development Suffixes 51 Nominalizing Prefixes 52 Adverbial Prefixes 53 More Demonstrative Articles 54 Objects of Intent, Emotion, Direction, and Success 55 More Reduplication Patterns 56 Interjections 57 Rare Suffixes 58 A Fully Annotated Text 59 Texts to Annotate 60 Conclusion Appendices Klallam Dictionary Klallam-English and English-Klallam sections only

8 The Preposition and Word Order

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A preposition is a small word that comes before a noun phrase and is used to indicate the noun phrase’s relationship to the verb. English has a lot of prepositions (over fifty), such as ‘in,’ ‘by,’ ‘on,’ ‘with,’  and so on.

Many languages have prepositions, but very few, if any, have as many prepositions as English. In fact, many languages of the world do not have prepositions at all.

Klallam has just one preposition, ʔaʔ. This is a very useful little word. It can be used to translate many English prepositions, but its most common use is in passive sentences where the verb ends in ‑təŋ or ‑nəŋ. Passive sentences will be covered in detail in a later section.

When we speak of word order we are referring to the order of verbs, noun phrases, and prepositional phrases in the sentence. The word order of a basic sentence in English has the subject noun phrase first, followed by the verb, and then the object noun phrase, as in:

The girl   saw   the boy.
subject   verb  object

In the second part of this section you will learn that the word order of a basic Klallam sentence is quite different from English.
 

This page has paths:

  1. Grammar Montler, et al.

Contents of this path:

  1. 8.1. The preposition ʔaʔ
  2. 8.2. Basic word order