74 Chapter 3 Lexical categories
(36) bengko raja ‘large house’^13
koceng koros 'skinny cat’
mored penter ‘smart student’
bengko gabay bengko se egabay ‘the house that was built’
koceng terro koceng se ekaterrowe ‘the cat that is wanted’
mored kennal mored se ekennale ‘the student that is known’
bungkos dhapa' bungkos se dhapa' ‘the package that arrived’
1.3.3 A subcategory adjective
But are the differences in grammatical behavior sufficient to justify an auto-
nomous category ‘adjective’? Rather than being a distinct lexical class, adjec-
tives are very possibly a subcategory of verbal roots. Subcategories of verbs
must be recognized in any event. A distinction between transitive and intransi-
tive verbs must be recognized on morphological grounds (voice marking) and
syntactic grounds (cooccurrence with a non-prepositional object). In (37), the
transitive verb baca ‘read’ takes actor voice morphology (here realized as the
homorganic nasal [m]) and occurs with a non-prepositional object. In (38), the
intransitive verb entar ‘go’ does not have the actor voice morphology (which
would result in ungrammaticality) and can have a goal in a prepositional phrase
(here dha' Sorbaja ‘to Surabaya’) but not a non-prepositional object.
(37) Ebu' maca buku.
mother AV.read book
‘Mother reads a book.’
(38) Ebu' entar dha' Sorbaja.
mother go to Surabaya
‘Mother goes to Surabaya.’
Also, distinctions must be made between active and stative semantically transi-
tive roots on similar morphological and syntactic grounds.
The morphological and syntactic differences between adjectives and other
verbal roots likely have an explanation in semantics. The adjective-like lexical
items in question describe properties, properties such as size (raja ‘big’), per-
sonal characteristic (penter ‘smart’), dimension (koros ‘skinny’) and so on. The
age arrived’. However, not all speakers will accept sentences in which the subject is not
marked definite, quantified, or possessed. As NPs, these collocations are unacceptable.
(^13) As detailed in Chapters 7 and 11, attributive adjectives such as raja ‘large’, koros
‘thin’, and penter ‘smart’ can also modify nouns as the predicate in a relative clause,
just as in English. So synonymous NPs would be bengko se raja ‘house that is large’,
koceng se koros ‘cat that is skinny’, and mored se penter ‘student that is smart’.