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contains several morphemes are termed polysynthetic. In Mono, most words are
monomorphemic, and most multimorphemic words contain only two morphemes. For
example, in the first text in Appendix A, the first ten sentences have 51 monomorphemic
words, 18 bimorphemic words, and 2 trimorphemic words. As a result, Mono is more
isolating than it is polysynthetic. Mono verbs may have up to four morphemes, but this is
quite rare. For example, the verb in (1) contains four morphemes, the root = = = = ‘go’, the
conditional marker , the prefixal reduplicant = = = = marking negation, and a High tone
marking non-future.
(1) J5 J5 J5 J5 =(=( =(=( =(=( =(=( AA AA AA AA
3SG COND-RED-go:NF NEG
‘If he/she doesn’t go...’
The index of fusion classifies languages according to whether morphemes contain
a single component of meaning or multiple components. Languages in which a given
grammatical morpheme typically has a single component of meaning are termed
agglutinative, whereas languages in which a given grammatical morpheme may subsume
multiple meanings are termed fusional. On this continuum, Mono is closer to the
agglutinative end, since the grammatical morphemes of Mono have single components of
meaning.
Another typological parameter worth considering is the type of morphological
processes most common in the language (Payne 1997: 30). These can be prefixation,
suffixation, infixation, stem modification, reduplication, or suprasegmental modification.
Mono is predominantly a prefixing language, but reduplication and suprasegmental
modification are also attested.
7.1 Grammatical categories
In this section, I present the morphological processes observed for nouns, verbs,
prepositions, and some particles in Mono. This will necessarily involve discussing the
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