its specifics may be unique to Miami-Illinois. Costa (2003) describes it as "vowel retraction", since it pulls the accent one syllable back from its expected place under rule (3). Otherwise, the accent is placed on every other syllable starting from the end of the world, beginning with the penultimate: 'he is a man', 'whooping crane'. Because of rule (1), the accent cannot land on voiceless vowels, and appears simply to ignore them for metrical purposes. Thus 'louse' and 'his hair' are accented on the antepenultimate syllables as if the latter were penultimate. Grammar Like all Algonquian languages, the grammar of Miami-Illinois is highly agglutinative, with particularly complex inflection on the verb. Other characteristically Algonquian features are a distinction between animate and inanimate gender on both nouns and verbs and a syntactic category of obviation. First-person forms distinguish clusivity (whether or not the addressee "you" is included in "we"). Nouns Miami-Illinois noun inflection distinguishes two genders (animate vs. inanimate), two numbers (singular vs. plural), and four cases (proximate, obviate, locative, and vocative). Gender is marked only in the proximate case. The endings of the noun, with common allomorphs, are detailed in the table below. Proximate case and gender The proximate case is the basic citation form of the noun. It is used to mark either the agent or patient of a verb in sentences with only one expressed noun phrase. Its singular forms regularly end in -a for animate nouns and -i for inanimate nouns. This transparent representation of gender on the noun sets Miami-Illinois apart from many other Algonquian languages, where deletion of word-final vowels has obscured gender marking. Gender is usually predictable from nature, but some nouns that would be expected to be inanimate are in fact marked as animate: 'hail', 'bead'. Many of these unexpectedly animate nouns have a special significance in traditional Miami-Illinois culture, and the gender assignment for some can be traced back to Proto-Algonquian. A handful of nouns can take either animate or inanimate gender. Categories with unpredictable internal gender assignments include body parts ( 'your cheek' but 'your nose') and names for plants. The regular animate proximate plural suffix is . Some nouns ending in in the singular end in (deleting the final ) in the plural, along with or to the exclusion of regular : 'bear' becomes 'bears', but 'ant' can become either or . A handful of nouns, including all nouns ending