Editing Mbula language (section)

===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)
#[[alienability (linguistics)|inalienable]] genitive (the referent of the item is inherently associated with some other entity)