Articles

Plurality of nouns is expressed with articles preceding the noun, rʌ "the (singular)" or yʌ "the (dual/plural)":

In addition to the simple plural/singular articles, the Classical Otomi language as described by Cárceres distinguished honorific and pejorative articles. In classical Otomi, the articles were ąn "neutral singular", e (neutral and honorific plural), nø̂ (pejorative singular) yo (pejorative plural) and o (honorific singular).^[8]

ąn ngų́ "the house"

nø̂ ngų́ "the damn house"

o ngų́ "the honored house"

Person, number, tense, aspect and mood

The present tense prefixes are di- (first person), gi- (second person), and i- (third person).

The preterit uses the prefixes do-, go- and bi-, perfect uses to-, ko-, ʃi-, imperfect uses dimá, gimá, mi, future uses go-, gi- and da- and pluperfect tamą-, kimą-, kamą-. All tenses use the same suffixes for dual and plural numbers and clusivity as the present tense; from here on only the singular forms will be given. The difference between preterit and imperfect is similar to the distinction between the preterit in Spanish habló "he spoke (punctual)" and the imperfect hablaba "he spoke/He used to speak/he was speaking (non-punctual)".

In Toluca Otomi, the semantic differences between the two subjunctive forms (A and B) are not easily defined; according to Lastra, sometimes subjunctive B has a meaning that is more recent in time than subjunctive A. Both have the meaning of something counterfactual. However, in other Otomi varieties, e.g. Otomi of Ixtenco Tlaxcala, the distinction between the two forms is one of subjunctive vs. irrealis.^[10] The past and present progressive are similar in meaning to English was and is X-ing respectively. The imperative is for issuing direct orders.

Verbs expressing movement towards the speaker such as ʔįhį "come" use a different set of prefixes for marking person/T/A/M. These prefixes can also be used with other verbs to express "to do something while coming this way". In Toluca Otomi, mba- is the third-person singular imperfect prefix for movement verbs.

To form predicates from nouns, the subject prefixes are simply added to the noun root:

Transitivity and stative verbs

Transitive verbs are inflected for agreement with their objects by means of suffixes, while using the same subject prefixes as the intransitive verbs to agree with their agents. However, in all dialects a few intransitive verbs take the object suffix instead of the subject prefix; usually these intransitive verbs are stative, i.e. describing a state. This has led to the interpretation that in Otomi, morphosyntactic alignment is split between active–stative and accusative systems.^[12]

In Toluca Otomi, the object suffixes are -gí (first person), -kʔí (second person) and -bi (third person), but the vowel /i/ may harmonize to /e/ when suffixed to a root containing /e/. The first-person suffix is realized as -kí after sibilants and after certain verb roots, and -hkí when used with certain other verbs. The second-person object suffix may sometimes metathesise to -ʔkí. The third-person suffix also has the allomorphs -hpí/-hpé, -pí, -bí, and sometimes third-person objects are marked with a zero morpheme.

Plural and dual number of objects is marked by the same suffixes as the subject, in some cases leading to ambiguity about the respective numbers of subject and object. With object suffixes of the first or second persons sometimes the verbal root changes, often dropping final vowels.

A class of words that describe properties or states has been described either as adjectives^[13] or as stative verbs.^[14] This word class consists of words with a meaning of attributing a property to an entity, e.g. "the man is tall", "the house is old". Within this class, some roots use the normal subject/T/A/M prefixes, while others always use the object suffixes to encode the person of the patient or subject. The use of the same suffixes that are used to encode the patient/objects of transitive verbs to encode the patient/subject of the predicate has been interpreted as a trait of split intransitivity.^[12] This phenomenon occurs in all dialects, but which stative verbs the object prefixes, and how many take, vary between dialects. In Toluca Otomi, most stative verbs are conjugated using a set of suffixes similar to the object/patient suffixes and a third-person subject prefix, while only a few use the present continuative subject prefixes. The following examples of the two kinds of stative verb conjugation in Toluca Otomi.^[13]

Other affixes

Most Otomi varieties also allow different kinds of adverbial meanings to be inflected on the verb.

From Toluca Otomi, examples of adverbial affixes are:

bí- An evidential prefix used about progressive events being witnessed by the speaker (It only exists in third person singular)

ga- A prefix expressing two simultaneous events or one event immediately preceding another. Also has the second person ngo-

ndɨ- A prefix expressing that something was done well or a lot.

Other affixes express inchoative aspect, instrumental function or purpose. There is also a suffix with the meaning of "meanwhile".^[13]