Yup'ik has highly
synthetic morphology: the number of
morphemes within a word is very high. The language is moreover
agglutinative, meaning that
affixation is the primary strategy for word formation, and that an affix, when added to a word, does not unpredictably affect the forms of neighboring affixes. Because of the tendency to create very long verbs through suffixation, a Yupʼik verb often carries as much information as an English sentence, and word order is often quite free. Three parts of speech are identified: nouns, verbs, and
particles. Because there are fewer parts of speech than in (e.g.) English, each category has a wider range of uses. For example, Yup'ik
grammatical case fulfills the role that English
prepositions do, and nominal
derivational affixes or
roots fulfill the role that English adjectives do.
Morphology In
descriptive work on Yup'ik, there are four regions within nouns and verbs that are commonly identified. The first of these is often called the
stem (equivalent to the notion of a
root), which carries the core meaning of the word. Following the stem come zero or more
postbases, which are
derivational modifiers that change the
category of the word or augment its meaning. (Yup'ik does not have adjectives; nominal roots and postbases are used instead.) The third section is called an
ending, which carries the
inflectional categories of
case (on nouns),
grammatical mood (on verbs),
person, and
number. Finally, optional
enclitics may be added, which usually indicate "the speaker's attitude towards what he is saying such as questioning, hoping, reporting, etc."
Orthographically, enclitics are separated from the rest of the word with a
hyphen. However, since hyphens are already used in
glosses to separate morphemes, there is potential for confusion as to whether a morpheme is a suffix or an enclitic, so in glosses the
equals sign is used instead. } } } } Because post-bases are derivational morphemes, and thus can change the part of speech of a word, many verbs are built from noun stems, and vice versa. For example, '
"I have fish" is a verb, despite the fact that ' "fish" is a noun; the postbase '''' "have" makes the resulting word a verb. These changes in grammatical category can apply iteratively, such that over the course of word formation, a word may become a noun, then a verb, then back to a noun, and so on.
Verb conjugation The
conjugation of Yup'ik verbs involves obligatory marking of
grammatical mood and
agreement.
Grammatical mood Yup'ik has a great number of grammatical moods. The moods can be categorized according to whether the clause in which they are found is independent or subordinate. There are four so-called
independent moods: the indicative, optative, interrogative, and participial; these typically are found on the main verbs of
independent clauses. Yupʼik also has ten
connective moods, which occur on the verbs of adverbial clauses; the connective moods are the Yup'ik equivalent of many
subordinating conjunctions of English, and are often translated as 'because', 'although', 'if' and 'while'. The form of a given mood may depend on the
transitivity of the verb (e.g., the intransitive form of the participial mood suffix is usually
-lriar, but when this mood is suffixed to a transitive verb, its form is
-ke instead), on the
person of the
grammatical subject (e.g., the optative mood is marked with
-li only if the subject is third person), or on the phonological or morphological environment. In addition to the connective moods listed above, there are five so-called "quasi-connective" moods. Though these are adverbial adjuncts to main clauses and thus are similar in function to the connective moods, they inflect like nominals (they inflect with case, not agreement).
Agreement Yup'ik has a rich system of
agreement on verbs. Up to two nominal
arguments may be cross-referenced (intransitive verbs agree with their sole argument, and transitive verbs agree with both arguments). Three
numbers (singular, dual, and plural) are distinguished, as well as at least three
persons (first, second, and third). The third person is unmarked when cross-referencing subjects, and the verbs of dependent clauses may have two types of third person forms depending on whether some argument is co-refers with the subject of the verb in the independent clause (see "Co-reference across clauses" below). To the extent that subject and object agreement markers are not
fusional, subject agreement linearly precedes object agreement. Depending on the grammatical mood of the verb and which grammatical persons are being cross-referenced, agreement may display either an
ergative pattern (where the sole argument of an intransitive verb is cross-referenced with the same morpheme that it would be if it were the object of a transitive verb) or an
accusative pattern (where the sole argument of an intransitive verb is cross-referenced with the same morpheme that it would be if it were the
subject of a transitive verb). Agreement markers vary in form depending on the grammatical mood of the verb. The two examples below illustrate this. In (1), the 1SG>3SG agreement marker is
-qa because the verb is in the indicative mood, while in (2) the agreement marker is
-ku due to verb being in the optative mood. {{interlinear|number=(1) {{interlinear|number=(2) The participial and indicative share a set of agreement markers, and all the connective moods likewise share a common set (which is shared also with some possessed nouns).
Co-reference across clauses The form of 3rd-person agreement in dependent clauses may vary depending on whether that 3rd-person argument is the same
referent as, or a different referent than, a 3rd-person subject of the independent clause. In some descriptive work on the language, when the subject of the independent clause is co-referential with the relevant argument in the dependent clause, the agreement in the dependent clause is said to reflect a "fourth" or a "reflexive third" person. Jacobson (1995) uses the following contrast to illustrate: {{interlinear|number=(3) {{interlinear|number=(4) The intransitive agreement in the dependent clause
ermig-pailg-an in (3) is
-an, indicating that the argument of the dependent clause is a different referent than the subject of the independent clause
nerellruuq, while in (4) the agreement
-mi indicates that the arguments of each clause are co-referential. Some grammatical moods do not have associated agreement markers that contrast these two types of third person. Some researchers have argued that the contrast in (3-4) exemplifies a type of
switch-reference, though McKenzie (2015) claims Yup'ik does not have the true characteristics of switch-reference, and that the Yup'ik system is better understood in terms of
obviation or long-distance
anaphora.
Nouns Yup'ik nouns inflect for
number,
case, and show agreement with the person and number of a
possessor if present.
Grammatical case The
morphosyntactic alignment of Yupʼik is
ergative-absolutive, meaning that
subjects of intransitive verbs bear the same
grammatical case (the
absolutive) as the
objects of transitive verbs, while the subjects of transitive verbs have a different case (the
ergative). For example, the sentence ''Angyaq tak'uq
("The boat is long") features an intransitive verb, and the subject (angyaq
, "the boat") is in the absolutive case. By comparison, in the sentence Angyaq kiputaa
("He buys the boat"), the verb is transitive, and it is now the object (angyaq'', "the boat") that bears the absolutive. This contrasts with
nominative-accusative languages like English, where the subjects of intransitives and transitives are identical in form ("
He slept", "
He ate the bread"), while the objects of transitives have a different case ("The moose saw
him"). In addition to the absolutive and ergative structural cases (the latter of which is
syncretic with the
genitive; collectively the ergative and genitive are usually called the
relative case), there are at least five other cases that are mostly-nonstructural: ablative-modalis (a historical syncretism of
ablative and
instrumental cases),
allative,
locative,
perlative, and equalis. The forms of these grammatical cases are variable, depending on the grammatical person and number of the head noun as well as the person and number of its possessor (if there is one).
Possession Possessed nouns, like all other nouns, inflect for number and case, but also show person and number agreement with their possessor. For example, consider a few forms of
saskaq "cup". The two leftmost nouns below are unpossessed, but the third is marked for a first person singular possessor
-ka (pronounced in this case as
-qa after
assimilating to a
uvular place of articulation). The final example marks plural number for both the noun itself and its possessor. {{interlinear|indent=2|italics2=yes|glossing3=yes|spacing=4 Possessors are often optional, but when present are marked with relative case: {{interlinear|indent=3
Word order Yup'ik has considerably more freedom of word order than English does. In English, the word order of subjects and objects with respect to a verb reflects the
thematic roles of the subject and object. For example, the English sentence
The dog bit the preacher means something different than
The preacher bit the dog does; this is because in English, the noun that comes before the verb must be the
agent (the biter), while the noun following the verb must be the
theme (the individual or thing that is bitten). In Yupʼik, word order is freer because the rich inflectional system often serves to unambiguously identify thematic relations without recourse to word order. These Yup'ik sentences both mean "the dog bit the preacher", for instance. {{interlinear |lang=esu |indent=2 {{interlinear |lang=esu |indent=2 The word order varies between these sentences, but the fact that ("dog") is marked with ergative case (
-m) is sufficient to identify it as the thematic agent. Thus, to say "the preacher bit the dog" in Yup'ik, one would need change which noun gets ergative case and which gets absolutive: Despite the greater freedom of word order, there seems to be a general preference for Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order (though VSO is also common, and pragmatic factors also play a significant role). This can be observed in circumstances where the inflectional system will not unambiguously determine which noun is the agent and which is the theme. This obtains, for instance, when both arguments of an indicative transitive verb are third person plural and unpossessed: can, in principle, mean either "the teachers like the children" or "the children like the teachers", since the case marking on "teachers" and "children" does not distinguish ergative from absolutive case (
-t marks unpossessed ergative plurals as well as unpossessed absolutive plurals). In cases like this, the SOV preference comes into play, and the sentence is most readily interpreted as "the teachers like the children".
Spatial deixis Yup'ik has a rich system of
spatial deixis. That is, many of the spatial properties of things and events are linguistically encoded in great detail; this holds true for
demonstrative pronouns (like English "this one", "that one") as well as spatial adverbs ("here", "there"). There are twelve categories that define the orientation of a thing or event with respect to the
environment. The environment in this sense includes topographical features (e.g., there is a contrast between upriver and downriver), the participants in the speech event (e.g., there is a contrast between proximity to the speaker and proximity to the hearer), and the linguistic context (one of these twelve categories is used for
anaphora). This twelve-way contrast is cross-cut by a trinomial contrast in horizontal extension/motion: this determines whether the referent is
extended (horizontally long or moving) or
non-extended, and if non-extended, whether
distal (typically far away, indistinct, and invisible) or
proximal (typically nearby, distinct, and visible). To illustrate, the spatial demonstrative roots of Yup'ik (which are then
inflected for case and number) are presented in the following table from Miyaoka (2012). Note that Classes I and II lack distal forms due to an inherently non-distal meaning (these forms only locate things that are near to the speaker/hearer). Class III is purely anaphoric, and thus only has a distal form. ==Yupʼik language education==