Definiteness

All nominal lexemes in Qohenje are taken as definite unless otherwise indicated.

"Definiteness" corresponds to participants that can be assumed to be uniquely identifiable by the listener. In other words, the speaker of the above sentence assumes that the listener knows (or can determine with no further information) exactly which man and exactly which warrior are being referred to.

TR arguments in Qohenje are invariably definite. New information can only be introduced as a LM, so a direct translation of A theif stole my car is not possible as Qohenje does not allow indefinite subjects (but see below...)

To mark the LM as indefinite, the verbal lexeme takes the suffix . That is, indefiniteness seems to be marked "non-locally" in Qohenje. What is really going on is that the verbal relation in Qohenje predicates the presumed uniqueness of the LM argument: to the Qohenje-speaker's mind this information is part of the verbal specification, and not a feature of the nominal LM... In other words, the Qohenje verbal really means is seeing the, while means is seeing a.

The RH mark on the verb shows that the LM argument is indefinite, i.e. that speaker indicates that he does not assume that the listener can uniquely identify the referent, and is offering it as new information.

Note that pronouns, which are old information by definition, can never co-occur with the RH mark:

Indefinite TRs...

As Qohenje does not allow indefinite TR arguments, then the only way to translate such structures from English is to use the notional passive, such that the indefinite argument is a LM, e.g.