Description:

The determiner te is the verbal auxiliary used for transitive verbs. Transitive verbs have a two gramaticalized syntactic arguments, a subject noun phrase in the ergative case which is the agent of the verb, and an object phrase in the absolutive case which is the patient of the verb. Any other arguments must be expressed periphrastically. Such verbs can undergo antipassive and benefactive valence change operations. Te very broadly has a sense like 'hit', from its paradigm verb 'skurun'.