III-arrive") rokʼu r-exu- "to feel pity" (lit. "heart die") sapu y-od- "to destroy" tʼamizi -od- "to cause" (from Avar тIамизе (tʼamize) "to force") woržizi -oq- "to fly" (from Avar -оржизе (-oržize) "to fly") xabar b-od- "to talk" (from Arabic خبر (xabar) "news, message" via Avar хабар (xabar) "story") Syntax Noun phrase Noun phrases (NP) per definition have a nominal head, which can be a noun, a pronoun or a substantivized expression such as a participle with the nominalizer -łi, verbal nouns (masdars) or substantivized restrictive adjectives (as in English: "the older one")—the latter one bears the suffix -ni directly after the adjective stem. They all inflect for case. As Tsez is a head-last language, all modifiers precede the head noun and agree with it in class. The neutral order of modifiers is usually: relative clause unemphatic possessive pronoun emphatic possessive pronoun restrictive adjective demonstrative numeral / quantifier non-restrictive adjective Note that the order of element number 4, 5 and 6 may vary: Modifiers can also include oblique noun phrases, which then take one of the two genitive suffixes depending on the case of the head noun: -si for absolutive, -zo for oblique head nouns. Compare: ħon-ƛʼo-si ʕadala ("the fool on the hill", absolutive) and ħon-ƛʼo-zo ʕadala-r ("to the fool on the hill", dative/lative) Verb phrase Verb phrases (VP) are phrases whose head is a verb or a copula. Verbs can have different transitivities that directly affect the case distribution for their nominal arguments. Copulas Copulas are used in the Tsez language to combine the subject with a noun phrase or with predicative adjectives and can in these cases be translated with the English copula "to be". The subject as well as the predicative noun stands in the absolutive case and is thus unmarked. If an environmental condition is described in form of an adjective, the adjective requires class IV agreement. Compare the following examples: and Intransitive verbs The only argument of intransitive verbs stands in the unmarked absolutive case. The verb agrees with the noun in class. An example phrase would be: is b-exu-s ("the bull died"). Monotransitive verbs Monotransitive verbs are verbs that take two arguments. As Tsez is an absolutive–ergative language, the subject, or—to be more precise—the agent, requires the ergative case, while the direct object (or patient) requires the absolutive case. The direct object of a transitive verb is thus marked in the same way as the