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6-3 Verbal Inflectional Suffixes!’

6-3.1 Introduction

The Aymara verb inflection system consists basic-
ally of eight paradigms of nine suffixes each. The eight
paradigms, usually referred to as tenses, are the Simple
(S), Future (F), Imperative (I), Desiderative (D-1),
Remonstrator (D-2), Remote Direct Knowledge (RDK), and
Remote Indirect Knowledge (RIK). There are also compound
tenses, consisting of certain of the plain tenses with
either the Non-involver -chi (NI) or the Inferential
-pacha (IF), and there are various combinations with the
nominalizer -iri.

Each of the nine suffixes in each tense is a
synchronically unitary morpheme representing semantically
that tense plus one of the four grammatical persons as
subject and another person as complement. The suffixes
are therefore called person/tense suffixes. (Tenses in
Aymara also convey direct or indirect acquisition of
information; see 8-2.3.) These suffixes are not syn-
chronically analyzable into morphemes but do contain
submorphemic recurrent partials (see below) identifiable
as representing individual persons or tenses. The
subject-complement relations expressed by the nine
suffixes are 173, 273, 323, 4+3, 142, 3+2, 2-1, 3-1,

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and 3+4. (2+4 exists in the related Jaqi language