Have a look at this Māori sentence:
Kei te oma te ngeru
and the translation into English:
The cat is running
In both Māori and English, the sentence has three parts:
a VERB
an AGENT
A marker indicating the TENSE
In our example
Kei te oma te ngeru
The cat is running
We have the Māori verb ‘oma’ and the English verb ‘run’.
The Māori verb 'oma' is an 'action' verb.
Kei te oma te ngeru
The cat is running
The agent is the 'doer' of the action.
In our example, the agent is ‘te ngeru’ in the Māori sentence, and 'the cat’ in the English sentence.
The cat is the agent because the cat is doing the action (running). The same is true of the Māori sentence, ’Te ngeru’ is the agent because 'te ngeru' is doing the action (oma).
The agent of these types of sentences will always be a noun.
Māori nouns can be divided into four types:
Common nouns
Personal nouns
Personal pronouns
Locative noun
In the following pages we will look at how the first three types work as the agent of a sentence.
We’ll leave a 4th type of noun, locative nouns ('locatives'), for later.
Notice that agent nouns - in both languages - have a word before them.
In English we have ‘the cat’ and in Māori, we have ‘te ngeru’.
These words are determiners or more specifically articles.
We'll be taking a close look at them because there are some major differences in how they are used in the two languages.
Tense describes when the action or experience named by the verb takes place.
In English, the tense is indicated by words like 'is', 'will’, 'has', and by endings on the verb. For example, ‘run' changes to 'running' or 'runs' or 'ran' depending on the tense.
In our example, 'the cat is running', we know that the action is happening now, because of the word 'is' and the 'ning' on the end of 'run'.
In Māori, tense is indicated by a small set of tense markers. For example, in 'kei te oma te ngeru', the tense marker 'kei te' indicates that the action is happening now.