LINGUIST List 10.1917

Sun Dec 12 1999

Sum: for Query:10.1728 Do Support,Adjectives,Verbs

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  • dave gough, for Query:10.1728 Do Support & Adjectives And Verbs

    Message 1: for Query:10.1728 Do Support & Adjectives And Verbs

     Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 21:45:00 +0200
    From: dave gough <mcgeenetactive.co.za>
    Subject: for Query:10.1728 Do Support & Adjectives And Verbs


    I asked a few questions regarding adjectives: - similarities in morphology across adjectives and (stative) verbs - the 'behaviour' of codemixed adjectives - the presence of a 'do' support strategy in the negative of predicate adjectives.

    A. OVERLAPPING MORPHOLOGY FOR ADJ AND VERBS.

    The one question I had concerned languages which showed similarities in the morphology for adjectives and verbs where these are otherwise distinct classes

    1. Hebrew - the present tense looks remarkably like adjectives as the verbs are inflected for number and gender, NOT for person. Adjectives and verbs are otherwise distinct classes; this can be seen by putting the sentences in the past or future tenses.

    2. Japanese and Tibetan are two languages that have partly overlapping morphology for verbs and adjectives. Japanese adjectives take much of the same tense marking as verbs do (samu-i 'is cold' -- samu-katta 'was cold' etc.). Some Tibetan etymological adjectives have limited verbal morphology too ('di pagi las che-gi red [di phgi lEE chigi rEE] this that than big-PRES/FUT AUX 'this is bigger than that' shows the present-future verbal suffix -gi and the auxiliary verb red (a predicative verb), like a full verbal phrase as in dering morang-gis bagleb za-gi red [the_ring morang-gi pha_lee s_gi rEE] today she-ERG bread eat-PRES/FUT AUX 'she is going to eat bread today'.

    3. Choctaw and most of the Salishan languages, all North American, haveidentical morphology for verbs and adjectives at both the functional and lexical level.

    4. In Malay, there are many cases of ADJ & VERB mophology forms are identical. 2 types of malay morpho forms are related to this : BER- and ME-KAN , other forms exists too like ME-

    Eg: MEYAKINKAN (root-YAKIN, often preceeded by YANG, relativiser) 1. "Bukti-bukti yang meyakinkan itu dibentangkan" (adj=convincing "the convincing evidence are brought forward") 2. "Dia meyakinkan saya." (v=convinced "he convinced me.")

    You can intensify the form in 1 with SANGAT (like english VERY) without altering the morphology, but not for 2.

    B. FORM OF BORROWED/CODE MIXED ADJECTIVES

    Here I was interested whether some languages treat borrowed adjectives unlike native ones.

    1) English adjectives insert easily, by way of code switching, into a German NP without even a trace of the agreement morphology that would have to appear on native ones. 2) A whole class of adstrate/superstrate/neighboring-language lexemes may notqualify as potential loans with a language that otherwise borrows heavily to the point of potential adoption of any (other) majority- language item: Basque has countless Romance origin nouns & verbs but strikingly few Romance adjectives, probably(?) because it does not have an adjectival class similar enough in morphosyntactic behavior to that of Romance & other IE lgs. Exceptions have in common what _looks like_ but need not in fact be a native or early-loan morphological structure, as _altu_ \"high\" or Latinisms/Hispanisms in -al and -ar. 3) Quebec French borrowed the English word 'fun', and treats it like an adjective, except it requires the use of the (masculine) definite article,in contradistinction to native adjectives: compare:

    -C'EST VRAIMENT LE FUN! "it's really fun!"versus C'EST VRAIMENT BEAU! "it's really beautiful".

    Other borrowed English adjectives do not behave thus, however: few English adjectives have been borrowed into Quebec French, but one other, WEIRDO, does not require the article and behaves like a native adjective. 4) With almost no exceptions, all borrowed adjectives in Japanese, whether from Chinese, eg kirei (pretty), or Western languages, eg modan (modern) conjugate differently to normal adjectives, taking na when modifying a noun and a copula when being used as a predicate (whereas almost all native adj.take -i and behave grammatically as stative verbs).

    Eg: atarashi-i hon, old book hon ga atarashi-i, the book is old (book SUBJ old) BUT kirei na hon, pretty book hon ga kirei da, the book is pretty (book SUBJ pretty COPULA)

    Unfortunately, a few native adjectives do the same, eg arata (fresh). Originally, all na adjetives were nouns, and na is an otherwise obsolete copula.

    C. DO SUPPORT IN NEGATIVE PREDICATE ADJECTIVES

    Are there languages that specifically require the equivalent of 'do' support in forming negative predicative adjectives.

    1. In Finnish, and possibly other Uralic languages, the negative is formed with a dummy verb e- which takes the personal suffixes and tense; thus eg. ole-n = I am, e-n ole = I am not

    2. Possibly Korean.

    D. Some references given:

    1996. Shahrzad Mahootian and Beatrice Santorini. \"Code switching and the complement/adjunct distinction.\" Linguistic inquiry 27, 464-479.

    1995. Beatrice Santorini and Shahrzad Mahootian. \"Codeswitching and the syntactic status of adnominal adjectives.\" Lingua 95, 1-27.

    Meechan, M. and S. Poplack (1995) Orphan categories in bilingual discourse: Adjectivization strategies in Wolof-French and Fongbe-French. Language Variation and Change 7: 169-194.

    E. MY GREATFUL THANKS TO:

    Christian Duetschmann Marjory Meechan Lameen Souag Chungmin Lee Dafna Graf Johannes Reese Chungmin Lee Marcia Haag Mahani Aljunied Stephen McCabe William Morris Stephane Goyette Chris Beckwith Gilles Bernard Xu Hui Ling Koontz John E Keiko Unedaya

    DAVE GOUGH mcgeenetactive.co.za