The grammar of the Otomi language displays a mixture of elements of synthetic and analytic structures. Particularly the phrase-level morphology is synthetic, whereas the sentence-level is analytic.[1] Simultaneously, the language is head-marking in terms of its verbal morphology, but not in its nominal morphology, which is more analytic. Otomi recognizes three large open word classes of nouns, verbs, and particles. There is a small closed class of property words, variously analyzed as adjectives or stative verbs.[2]
According to the most-common analysis, the Otomi language has two kinds of bound morphemes, proclitics and affixes. Proclitics differ from affixes mainly in their phonological characteristics – they are marked for tone and block nasal harmony.[3] Some authors consider proclitics to be better analyzed as prefixes.[4][5] Orthographically, the standard orthography writes proclitics as separate words, whereas affixes are written joined to their host root. Most affixes are suffixes and with few exceptions occur only on verbs, whereas the proclitics occur both in nominal and verbal paradigms. Proclitics mark the categories of definiteness and number, person, negation, tense and aspect – often fused in a single proclitic. Suffixes mark direct and indirect objects, as well as clusivity (the distinction between inclusive and exclusive we), number, location and affective emphasis. Historically, as in other Oto-Manguean languages, the basic word order is verb–subject–object (VSO), but some dialects tend towards subject–verb–object (SVO) word order, probably under influence from Spanish.[1] Possessive constructions use the order possessed-possessor but modificational constructions use modifier-head order.