Word types

This section gives an overview of the various word types in Krestia.

Lexical word types

In the context of individual words, Krestia’s words are divided into the following lexical word types: nouns, verbs, modifiers, and syntactic keywords. Furthermore, each word type may be divided into subtypes. The following is an overview of Krestia’s word types:

• Nouns: As in natural languages, nouns represent concrete objects and abstract ideas, but unlike in most natural languages, nouns in Krestia also encompass adjectives. Nouns are divided into the following subtypes: - Common nouns: These are self-contained words that represents things that can exist independently and cover most nouns in Krestia. Examples include “people”, “houses”, “thoughts”, etc. - Associative nouns: They represent objects or entities that are often inalienable and almost always found attached to another object or entity. Examples include body parts (“arm of”, “head of”), familial relationships (“mother of”, “twin of”), and intrinsic properties (“size of”, “age of”). - Structural nouns: They represent concepts that include multiple lexical components working together as a whole. Examples include measurement units, time, and date. - Numbers: Krestia has a separate word type for numbers, mainly due to their ability to be placed in mathematical expressions, which means that the language has modifiers exclusively for modifying them. Unlike the subtypes of nouns above, numbers cannot inflect or derive new words. - Names: Names stand in their own subtype of nouns since the interaction between names and other words is relatively limited, and names need a special orthographic indication (i.e., the capital letter when writing in the Latin alphabet, or the brackets in Timeran).
• Verbs: Verbs represent actions like in natural languages. Each verb has a certain valency, indicating how many arguments may be associated with it. This can range between zero and three (inclusive). The specific valency of each verb determines what kind of inflections and derivations it has.
• Modifiers: Modifiers are words that are attached to nouns and verbs that semantically qualifies their meanings. Each modifier can modify either nouns or verbs, and some may be able to modify both. Furthermore, depending on the meaning of a modifier, the modifier itself may have one or more arguments, or even a sentence, attached to it.
• Structural keywords: These words, like the keywords in a programming language, organize words and sentences into meaningful blocks, like paragraphs or lists. They rarely appear in the middle of a sentence, and often appear at sentence boundaries to delineate paragraphs or other structures.

Structural word types

The lexical word types decide what inflections and derivations a word in the dictionary has, whereas the structural word types decide how a word in a sentence interacts with other words in it. Krestia has the following structural word types:

• Predicates: Predicates act as the keystone of a sentence, as every sentence has exactly one predicate. A predicative word alone can form a sentence, but no sentence can exist without one. Generally, verbs serve the role of predicates.
• Arguments: Arguments act as complements to predicates and modifiers, as some predicates and modifiers are unmeaningful without arguments that clarify its meaning. Nouns generally serve the role of arguments.
• Attachments: These are words that cannot stand on their own and must be attached to other words (either predicates or arguments). Modifiers often assume this role, but quite often adjectives are inflected to become attachments as well.
• Separators: These words that indicate the beginning or end of a chapter, paragraph, or a list. This role can be fulfilled only by structural keywords.

Deriving words into other types

Nouns and verbs can undergo suffixation, the forms of which are categorized as inflections or derivations. Inflections modify the semantics of a word without changing its type, whereas derivations do so while changing the word type, from a noun to a verb, or vice versa. Modifiers and structural keywords, on the other hand, cannot undergo any kind of form change.