phrase after the object or occur as uninflected verbs in an adjacent cosubordinate adverbial predication forms which occur immediately after the object and never function as predicates in an adjacent cosubordinate adverbial construction forms which can occur immediately after the predicate and never function as a predicate in an adjacent cosubordinate adverbial construction Verbs and instrumental nouns Verbs and instrumental nouns crossover in that verbs theoretically derived from these nouns appear in an identical form. I.e., there is no overt morphological derivation which might indicate what direction the derivation has occurred in. Examples include: – 'wall' – 'to wall in' – 'paddle' – 'to paddle' – implement for sweeping – 'to sweep up' using this implement – 'a line' – 'to draw a line' Nouns There is no syntactic distinction between nouns and adjectives in Mbula. Nouns are syntactically distinguished by the following three characteristics: They may function 'in isolation' (i.e. without any further syntactic modification) as arguments in a predication, a property that distinguishes them from non-inflecting stative verbs. When functioning as the heads of noun phrases, nouns occur phrase initially with all modifiers following. A subclass of nouns is morphologically distinguished by being obligatorily inflected with a set of genitive suffixes. There are eight semantic features of noun referents which are especially important for characterising the morphosyntactic behaviour of Mbula nouns: human referent animate referent potent (the referent of the noun can be viewed as the ultimate cause of some process which affects another entity) concrete (the noun can potentially refer to a physical location to which, at which, or from which an event takes place) temporal (the noun may be used to delineate the time at which an event takes place) potentially consumable (the referent of the noun can be eaten or drunk) individuated/count (the referent of the noun may be easily separated from its environment and may not be divided without changing its essential nature/character) inalienable genitive (the referent of the item is inherently associated with some other entity) Pronouns Pronouns make the following person/number distinctions. 1 singular 1 dual exclusive 1 dual inclusive 1 plural exclusive 1 plural inclusive 2 singular 2 dual 2 plural 3 singular 3 dual 3 plural Pronouns also inflect for nominative, accusative, referent and locative cases. Most pronouns are composed of an initial case marker plus a person-number marker. The nominative series of pronouns is generally used to encode animate