participants which function as subjects. There are three demonstrative pronouns: ('this one, these ones'), ('that one, those ones') and ('that one over there, those ones over there'). Accusative pronouns encode animate participants which function as objects. The referent pronouns encode virtually any animate oblique argument. Locative pronouns indicate an animate location toward which an action is taking place in dynamic predications, or at which an item is located. The locative form is also used to encode possession. Interrogative pronouns such as who, when, where, operate in a replacement fashion. That is, the interrogative pronoun is used in place of the normal syntactic position of the item being questioned. Verbs The characteristic syntactic function of verbs is to act as the heads of predications in which they occur. They are defined by a number of properties: They typically index the person and number of the subject of the sentence. They may contain transitivity-altering prefixes. They may not function as noun-phrase modifiers in certain frames. Uninflected verbs There are several categories of non-inflecting verbs in Mbula: stative experiential verbs stative verbs encoding properties verbs of manner aspectual verbs All of these non-inflecting verbs function only as predicates in clauses. Thus they cannot function as heads of noun phrases and they cannot function as restrictive modifiers of nouns unless they are relativised or nominalised. Syntactically, they resemble inflected verbs. They are only distinguished from other verbs morphologically. Adverbials This class is called adverbials and not adverbs because Mbula contains a large collection of words which are defined as modifiers of constituents other than nouns. Semantically, such forms typically encode notions of time, aspect, manner and modality. Quantifiers Quantifiers are uninflected forms which always occur in noun phrases following nouns, locative/alienable genitive pronouns, and attributive stative nouns, but before determiners, locative/alienable genitive prepositional phrases, relative clauses and demonstratives. The Mbula counting system is based upon the notions of five and twenty. Prepositions Prepositions are generally uninflected forms which govern a single noun phrase complement and relate it to a head or predicate. Mbula employs five categories of prepositions: the referent preposition used for oblique arguments the locative preposition used for animate goals towards which some entity moves, sites at which some entity is located and body parts which perceive something the preposition used to express resemblance, similarity or approximate equality (i.e., like, as) the comitative and manner prepositions used for accompaniment and manner prepositional