Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
Parts-of-speech systems 17 In adjectival-noun languages, adjectival meanings seem in general to be expressed by nouns that designate an object (or objects) embodying a specified quality. The English equivalent of such nouns often takes the form adjective-plus-one(s), as the following example from the adjectival-noun lan- guage Quechua illustrates: (35) Rikaˇska: hatun-(kuna)-ta I saw big-(pl)-acc ‘I saw the big one(s)’ A comparison of (35) with (36) illustrates the grammatical similarity in Quechua between nouns with adjectival meanings (such as hatun ‘big (one)’) and other nouns (such as alkalde ‘mayor’). (36) Rikaˇska: alkalde-(kuna)-ta I saw mayor-(pl)-acc ‘I saw the mayor(s)’ As these examples show, nouns that express adjectival meanings can, like other nouns, be used as verbal objects, in which case they take the accusative suffix -ta, and can be pluralized by means of the suffix -kuna. The following Quechua examples further illustrate the grammatical par- allelism between nouns with adjectival meanings and other nouns in this adjectival-noun language: (37) Chay runa hatun (kaykan) that man big (is) ‘That man is big’ (38) Chay runa alkalde (kaykan) that man mayor (is) ‘That man is mayor’ (39) chay hatun runa that big man ‘that big man’ (40) chay alkalde runa that mayor man ‘that man who is mayor’ These examples show that nouns with adjectival meanings are not grammati- cally distinguished from other nouns either in their use as predicates or in their use as attributive modifiers. Thus, in (37) and (38), the predicates hatun and 18 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen alkalde both follow the subject and both optionally co-occur with the copula- tive verb kaykan, while in (39) and (40) the modifiers hatun and alkalde both immediately precede the noun they modify. Adjectival-verb languages seem to be like languages with closed adjective classes in the way they use verbs to express adjectival meanings. As was noted above, in languages like Bemba, which have closed adjective classes but also use verbs extensively to express adjectival meanings, the usual verbal equivalent of a predicate adjective is a predicate verb in a non-relative construction (cf. example (33)), while the usual verbal equivalent of a modifying adjective is a verb in a relative construction (cf. example (32)). These same equivalents are found in adjectival-verb languages, as the following examples from one such language, Mandarin Chinese, illustrate: (41) Neige n¨uaizi piaoliang that girl beautiful ‘That girl is beautiful’ (42) Neige n¨uaizi liaojie that girl understand ‘That girl understands’ (43) piaoliang de n¨uaizi beautiful rel girl ‘a girl who is beautiful, a beautiful girl’ (44) liaojie de n¨uaizi understand rel girl ‘a girl who understands, an understanding girl’ Examples (41) and (42) are predications, while examples (43) and (44) are modi- fication constructions. As these examples show, verbs with adjectival meanings, such as piaoliang ‘(be) beautiful’, and other verbs, such as liaojie ‘understand’, function in the same way in each of these construction types. While there are some languages, such as Mandarin, which are clearly adjectival-verb languages, in that they appear to offer no consistent basis for dis- tinguishing verbs with adjectival meanings from other verbs (or, at least, from other stative verbs such as ‘understand’ or ‘know’), there are other languages whose classification as adjectival-verb languages is more problematic. These are languages in which the words that express adjectival meanings have most of the grammatical properties of (other) verbs – especially of stative verbs – but in which these adjectival words also have at least one distinctive property not shared by (other) verbs. One example of such a language is Mojave. In this language, adjectivals and stative verbs are indistinguishable when they are used |
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