Editing Tewa language (section)

=== Noun hierarchy ===
Tewa has a noun hierarchy in order to determine which noun phrase goes in which position, however this only influences passive sentences. In Tewa, this is a simple binary distinction between animate and nonanimate noun phrases. 

However, unlike in other languages with a noun hierarchy, such as Navajo, Tewa also marks the subject with the postposition -dí, meaning that there is not a concrete need to adhere to the noun hierarchy as that information is already morphologically encoded into sentences. Because of this, younger Tewa speakers tend to not use the noun hierarchy and instead rely on the morphology present in passive sentences.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Kroskrity |first=Paul V. |year=1978 |title=Aspects of Syntactic and Semantic Variation within the Arizona Tewa Speech Community |journal=Anthropological Linguistics |volume=20 |number=6 |pages=235–257 |jstor=30027410}}</ref>