Abesabesi offers a formal distinction between two major classes: vowel-initial and consonant initial words. This separation is probably a relic of a former noun-class system with vowel prefixes (see Section 4.2.2) which resulted in a separation of nouns and noun-like words from verbs. Henceforth, I will call the vowel-initial words consisting of nouns and noun-like words nominals and the consonant-initial words verbs. In fact, there are a few nouns with initial consonant, mostly loan-words. However, as they are reanalyzed as words with deleted initial /i/, they are seen as words with an underlying initial /i/. For a short discussion, see Section 2.3. The major syntactic distinction between these two broad classes is that nominals can head NPs and verbs can head VPs. Cite

Nominals consist of prototypical nouns and their subclasses, demonstratives, and pronouns. Besides their initial vowel and their ability to head an NP, which distinguishes them from verbs, nominals also feature a human/non-human distinction, which is a leftover from the former noun-class system. This distinction might be inherently determined (such as in prototypical nouns) or marked by agreement (such as on property nouns or pronouns). The word class of nouns is discussed in Chapter 4 along with nominal morphology, non-prototypical nouns, and the noun phrase. Determiners are discussed in Section 7.1 and Pronouns in Section 7.2.Cite

Verbs are consonant-initial, and can head VPs. They are discussed in Section 5 along with verbal morphology, categories, non-prototypical verbs, and verb phrases. Cite

The word class of adverbs might have developed from nouns as they have an initial vowel. They cannot, however, be categorized as nominals, because they cannot function as core arguments and do not head NPs. A detailed discussion can be found in Section 6.3.Cite

Lastly, the particle category encompasses all little words that are purely functional and cannot be assigned to one of the other categories. They are discussed in Section 6.4 Cite

We distinguish the following word classes and sub-classes:Cite