Speech categories
A speech category is a class of words with the same grammatical role.
What makes words belong to the same category?
According to linguists, words typically belong to the same category if they:
- perform the same syntactical role, such as ye and zu in the sentence amie ye zu "I love you and you love me" which are both substantives because they are both arguments of the factive amie "(both of us, we both) love (each other)
- perform the same semantic function, such as gal in ar gal "many people" and paj in ipi ski paj "five fingers" which are both enumeratives because they both indicate the quantity of substantives
The speech categories
The speech categories comprise substantives, descriptives, enumeratives, factives, qualificatives, relatives, essives, copulatives, particles, ideophones, and
interrogatives.
Substantives
Substantives are words that name entities and abstract concepts.