The writer holds the opinion that syntax is the most central and most interesting section of the grammar of any language and is ideally presented before the welter of morphological detail (cf. Dixon 1972). However, different languages demand different strategies of description. Just as the phonological rules of Yidiɲ are a necessary prerequisite to an understanding of the morphology (and must be described first) so the morphology involves complex alternations, dependencies and orderings between derivational affixes, which suggest that it be most appropriately dealt with ahead of syntax.

3.1.1 briefly previews Yidiɲ's syntactic type, to provide some contextualisation for the discussion of morphology (from 3.2 on). 3.1.2 then mentions the semantic hierarchy in terms of which a number of rather diverse grammatical choices are made (the choices all being of a ‘more/less’ rather than an ‘either/or’ type). 3.1.3–5 describe some of the characteristic features of discourse organisation in Yidiɲ, in terms of which a number of the grammatical alternations described in Chapters 3 and 4 can better be understood and appreciated.

Note that from here on the term ‘word’ will normally refer to ‘grammatical word’; this contrasts with the usage in Chapter 2 where ‘word’ indicated ‘phonological word’. (A grammatical word consists of a whole number of (one or more) phonological words – 2.4.)

Preliminary remarks

Syntactic orientation. Nouns and adjectives in Yidiɲ have one case inflection (ergative) marking transitive subject (A) function, and a further case (absolutive, having zero realisation) for both intransitive subject (S) and transitive object (O).