64 Chapter 3 Lexical categories
(6) banne tolesan ‘no written thing’
banne kapenterran ‘no intelligence’
Second, uninflected noun roots can occur before the demonstratives reya ‘this’
and rowa ‘that’ (and others) whereas non-nominal roots cannot.^2
(7) bengko rowa ‘that house’
saba rowa ‘that field’
bapa' rowa ‘that father’
baca rowa
toles rowa
sala rowa
penter rowa
*kene' rowa
Unlike verbs and adjectives, noun roots can be directly modified by
numbers and quantifiers. In the case of numbers the noun root can be imme-
diately preceded or followed by a number, as in (8), while verbal and adjectival
roots cannot.^3
(8) settong bengko bengko settong ‘one house’
lema saba saba lema' ‘five fields’
tello bapa' bapa' tello' ‘three fathers’
settong baca baca settong
lema toles toles lema'
tello entar entar tello'
settong sala sala settong
lema penter penter lema'
tello kene' kene' tello'
Also, only noun roots can be modified by quantifiers such as kabbi ‘all’ or sab-
ban ‘each’ without additional morphology.
(^2) The verbal and adjectival forms are ungrammatical only at the phrasal level. At the
clausal or sentential level they are fully grammatical. For example, baca rowa can be
interpreted as an imperative meaning ‘Read that!’ Kene' rowa can be interpreted as a
clause with inverted word order meaning ‘That is small’. The point of the examples in
(7) is that only nouns can combine with demonstratives in phrases.
(^3) It is customary for numbers ending in a vowel to take the - extension in positions
other than pre-nominal position. Thus, in (8), tello' and lema' occur rather than tello and
lema. See section Chapter 4 section 3 for a discussion of the morphological category
‘extension’.