76 Chapter 3 Lexical categories
modifiers.
In the end the issue could well boil down to whether one is predisposed to
recognize a lexical class of adjectives wholly distinct from verbs. Those who do
may cite the properties illustrated above as evidence. Those who do not must
recognize a subcategory of verbs, stative intransitive verbs, which differ from
other intransitive verbs on the basis of these same properties. The evidence on
either side is equivocal, but theoretical parsimony favors dispensing with the
additional category. Taking a somewhat jaundiced view, one might agree with
Croft (2005: 435), “Since everyone is selective for their own opportunistic theo-
retical reasons, debates on whether there are languages with a “noun”/”verb”
distinction, or languages without “adjectives”, cannot ever be resolved.” De-
spite the conclusion that adjectives should be considered a subcategory of verb
and not a wholly distinct lexical class, I will continue to refer to some lexical
items as ‘adjectives’ for ease of identification.
1.4 Precategorial roots
The issue of precategorial roots was touched on above. A precategorial root is a
lexical root that can function syntactically as either a noun or a verb with no
derivational morphology. Inflectional morphology associated both with verbs,
e.g. agreement and tense morphology, and with nouns, e.g. case and number
morphology, is directly applicable to the root. Madurese contains a modest
number of roots that exhibit this property, illustrated previously with the root
tokol ‘hammer’. This most frequently and obviously presents itself in the case
of roots that one might most naturally consider noun roots, including instrumen-
tal concepts such as are' ‘scythe’, pacol ‘hoe’, kaca ‘glass/mirror’, jala ‘net’,
sapo ‘broom’ and others, occupations and work locations such as tokang ‘arti-
san’, tane ‘farm’, warung ‘small shop’ and others, and various other roots.
When used as declarative verbs, these roots invariably take an actor voice pre-
fix, either ng- (which is subject to assimilation) or a-. Examples are given in
(41-43).^14
(41) a. Kaca jarowa bassa.
glass that broken
‘That mirror broke.’
(^14) If one were to take these as noun roots, the prefixation of the actor voice could be
characterized as deriving a verb with a meaning something like ‘do an appropriate ac-
tivity with N’. If one were to take them as verb roots, the derivation from verb to noun
would simply be conversion with the meaning ‘thing used to V’. The former seems
more likely than the latter, but ultimately the issue is not particularly significant.