This section aims at a brief overview of the structure of Abesabesi. It
also presents several salient features of the language.
Abesabesi is a tonal language with three tonal registers. All three tones
are used to distinguish lexemes, while the high tone can only rarely be
found on lexemes. It does, however, function as a grammatical tone
marking the mood of a clause, locative phrases, possession, and relative
clauses. Automatic and non-automatic downstep both exist in Abesabesi.
The vowel inventory consists of seven oral vowels and five nasal vowels,
and the consonant inventory includes labio-velar plosives and several
labialized consonants. Frequent phonological processes are vowel
deletion, assimilation, and vowel harmony. The latter can be categorized
into a prefix and a suffix harmony that take different forms in the four
dialects. Abesabesi's syllable has the structure N or (C)V(V)(C). Closed
syllables, however, only appear at the end of a word. Nouns start with a
vowel and have the minimal structure V.CV, and verbs have the minimal
structure CV. Verbs and nouns can both take various inflectional and
derivational affixes. Abesabesi could thus be counted as an
agglutinative language.
Nouns are categorized as "human" and "non-human".
While human nouns switch their initial vowel for plural marking,
non-human nouns do not mark plurality. Nominal modifiers demonstratives
and property nouns are also marked as plural by switching the initial
vowel. Nouns can take possessive suffixes and a goal suffix. All nominal
modifiers (other nouns or pronouns, determiners, numerals, and property
nouns) follow the noun in a noun phrase. Spatial relations are expressed
through function nouns that are located before the noun.
Verbs can take subject pronoun prefixes, prefixes, and object pronoun
suffixes. Moreover, they can receive a pluractionalis extension or be
nominalized by either a prefix (simple nominalization) or a circumfix
(gerund). The bound subject pronouns come in three sets: realis
pronouns, irrealis pronouns, and habitual pronouns.
Besides the three bound pronoun paradigms, there are the following
personal pronoun sets: independent pronouns, logophoric pronouns, dative
pronouns, independent possessive pronouns, and emphatic pronouns. All
personal pronouns distinguish three persons, singular from plural, and
in the third person, human from non-human.
The basic order of the sentence is SVO. Ditransitive verbs are followed
first by the indirect object and then by the direct object. A closed
class of auxiliary verbs can precede the main verb or follow it in order
to add context to the verbal event or to add a participant.
Abesabesi distinguishes the three moods - declarative, interrogative,
and imperative - which are differentiated by grammatical tones.
Negation is expressed through the absence of a grammatical tone and a
clause-final particle.