70 Chapter 3 Lexical categories
nase' ‘rice’ nase'e
bengko ‘house’ bengkowe
mored ‘student’ *moredi
It is not the case that the notions denoted by the adjectival and nominal stems
are incompatible with a durative meaning. However, the durative morpheme
cannot be used to express this. Rather a timeframe must be explicitly indicated
to capture that aspect of the durative morpheme. As with other diagnostics for
verbs, the durative is not compatible with all roots that might be taken to be
verbs. Punctual verbs such as saba' ‘put’, temmo ‘find’, and others disallow the
suffix as the semantics of a punctual event and a durative state of affairs are
incompatible. Also, while agentive verbs such as berka' ‘run’, jalan ‘walk’ and
others are compatible with the durative morpheme, dynamic intransitive verbs
(those that involve action but not strong agentivity) such as labu ‘fall’, dhateng
‘come’, and others are incompatible with the durative marker.
As stated at the outset of this section, however, the category verb is the
most difficult single category to establish on positive independent grounds.
Many of the morphological properties that accrue to verbs but are unavailable to
adjectives and nouns may have a semantic explanation. Establishing adjective
as a distinct category may provide the necessary rationale for recognizing three
lexical categories for open class items, but here the results are equivocal as well.
1.3 The (sub)category adjective
The last of the open class lexical categories to consider is adjective. It has been
claimed for some Austronesian languages that there is no distinct category ad-
jective, that lexical items denoting what are adjectives in other languages are
part of the category verb (Donohue 1999, Klamer 1998, van den Berg 1989).
And, in fact, Madurese adjectives and verbs share a great many properties,
properties which distinguish them from nouns. Some of these properties are
enumerated in section 1.3.1. Some characteristics that potentially distinguish
them are taken up in section 1.3.2, and the need for a separate category adjec-
tive is evaluated in light of these.
1.3.1 Adjective-verb similarities
The first properties shared by adjectives and verbs that distinguish them from
nouns were discussed above, when establishing the category noun. First, as
shown in (5), while nouns are negated with the quantifier banne ‘no’, adjectives
and verbs take the negative particle ta', or lo', which is used in Western Madura.