The Yimas language is spoken by the Yimas peoples of New Guinea. According to data collected in 2000, there are approximately 300 native speakers. Hence, this language is considered potentially endangered.
Yimas has inflectional prefixes that encode subject and object agreement. The following sentences are simple examples (Note: Foley uses A to represent the subject of a transitive verb and S to represent the subject of an intransitive verb. This distinction exists because Yimas is an ergative language.):
(1). pu-n-tay
3PL O—3SG A—see
‘He saw them.’
(2). na-mpu-tay
3SG O—3PL A—see
‘They saw him.’
In addition to demonstrating the inflectional prefixes, these examples also exhibit an interesting phenomenon with respect to the order of subject and object agreement morphemes. Specifically, object agreement occurs further away from the root than does subject agreement, which is very rare cross-linguistically.
Below is a classification of the inflectional prefixes used in (1) and (2).
| Morpheme | Agreement Marker | Meaning |
| na- | 3rd person singular object | Him/her |
| n- | 3rd person singular subject | He/she |
| pu- | 3rd person plural object | Them |
| mpu- | 3rd person plural subject | They |
The relationships between these morphemes are clear. The third person singular object and subject have /n/ in common. The third person plural object and subject have /pu/ in common.
Furthermore, Yimas is known for having a considerably free word order due to its inflectional prefixes. An example of this observation appears in the pair of sentences below:
(3). payum narmaŋ na-mpu-tay
men woman 3SG O—3PL S—see
‘The men saw the woman.’
(4). payum narmaŋ pu-n-tay
men woman 3PL O—3SG S—see
‘The woman saw the men.’
As you can see, the lexical entries for ‘men’ and ‘woman’ occur in the same order in these sentences. This is acceptable in Yimas because the inflectional prefixes that attach to the verb indicate which lexical entry is the subject and which is the object. However, when the subject and object do not differ in number the meaning of the verb becomes ambiguous. In this case, the word order would be more restricted.
As each inflectional affix is added to the root, it then adds its own features to the V node that dominates it. Thus, the Word Structure Tree for example (1) is as follows:
Foley, W. (1991). Basic Verbal Morphology. In The Yimas Language of New Guinea (pp. 193-195). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Morphology 440 640 