14 2 Overviewafter a vowel or after a stressed C-final syllable), and feminines add suffix -en
or -ten, replacing FeSg -t. Examples of affixal plurals are deke-tasn 'baskets'
and t-i-s-anan-en 'oxpeckers'.
Other nouns form the plural by stem-ablaut (in addition to the usual
change of the vocalic prefix to PI -i-). The final vowel of an ablauted plural
stem appears as a, while other stem vowels are realized as high (normally u if
full, 9 if short). Examples of ablaut plurals for nouns in (10) are i-bujan
'monitor lizards' and t-i-s-ύηαη 'oxpeckers' (the latter competes with affixal
t-i-s-anan-en).
There are also a number of plural patterns involving a mixture of ablaut
(perhaps just a change of quality in a final vowel) and affixation.
2.3 Prefix Reduction
It was mentioned above that nouns express (local) dependency on a preceding
element by undergoing Prefix Reduction. This applies to a subject (but not
object) noun after a verb, to a noun functioning as complement of a
preposition, and to a noun stem functioning as a compound final.
Most nouns have a vocalic prefix -i- in the plural. This PI prefix is audibly
reduced to -9- or zero in the relevant syntactic positions. These same nouns
have a vocalic prefix -α-, -e-, -as-, or -a- in the singular. Of these Sg prefixes,
-ae- and -a- are already short vowels and cannot be audibly reduced. However,
-a- and -e- are reduced to a short vowel, either -a- or -ae- depending on dialect
and on the height of the vowel of the following syllable. Nouns that do not
have a segmentable vocalic prefix are unaffected by Prefix Reduction.
The position of the accent is unaffected by Prefix Reduction. In particular,
if the vocalic prefix happens to be accented, its reduced variant (other than
zero) continues to bear accent. In cases where PI vocalic prefix -i- is reduced
to zero, the accent shifts to the preceding syllable (i.e. to the final syllable of
the preceding word). Thus t-Vhatt-en 'sheep-Pi' occurs in the locative PP dasr
"t-3-hatt-en 'in the sheep', with a dialectal variant (e.g. K-d) dser "t-^-hatt-en.
Where Prefix Reduction has applied audibly, the symbol Ί is given at the
beginning of the word in question. Thus e-haen 'house' has a reduced form
"ae-hasn.2.4 Noun phrases
Noun phrases (NP's) begin with a head noun (the lexical head of the NP),
which may be followed by a demonstrative, a possessor (with preposition an),
or a relative clause (subject or non-subject type). "Adjectives" are a special
case of subject relative (see below). Numerals, however, normally precede the
modified noun, except that 'one' may follow the noun when it functions as an