88 Carol Ge.ne.ttl and Kristine Hildebrandt
3.4. COMPARISON OF SIMPLE ADJECTIVES WITH OTHER LEXICAL CLASSES
This description of the simple adjective class has mentioned a number of proper-
ties that distinguish this class from the classes of nouns and verbs. These facts are
summarized in Table i.
Although nouns and simple adjectives share syntactic behaviours, in that both
may occur in copula complement slots, we see from this table that the two classes
differ in their phonotactic realizations, in their ability to function as heads of NPs,
and in their ability to form compounds with iU 'do'. The most striking difference
between simple adjectives and verbs is, of course, the inability of simple adjectives
to take verbal inflections or to compound with iU 'do' in morphological causa-
tives. In addition, they differ in their phonotactic properties, and in their position
within NPs.
Simple adjectives also differ from verb-like adjectives in a number of ways.
These will be discussed in detail in §4.4 below.
TABLE i. Comparison of properties of simple adjectives, nouns, verbs
Property Simple adjectives Nouns Verbs
Phonotactic constraints (§3.1)
Affixation (§3.2)
Head of NP (§3.3.1)
Post-nominal in NP (§3.3.1)
Occur as copula complement (§3.3.2)
Morphological Causation (§3.3.3)
None
None
No
Yes
Yes
NoMany
None
Yes
—
Yes
NoMany
Some
No
No
No
Yes4. Phonological, morphological, and syntactic
properties of verb-like adjectives
There is clear evidence that verb-like adjectives are a distinct lexical class from
the classes of nouns and simple adjectives. The mere fact that they may be in-
flected with a limited range of verbal suffixes is sufficient to establish this fact, al-
though other behaviour that differentiates these classes also exists. However, since
verb-like adjectives share many morphological properties with verbs, it is not im-
mediately obvious that verb-like adjectives are not simply a sub-class of verbs, as
opposed to being a distinct lexical class. Throughout our description, we will con-
sider whether the ways in which verb-like adjectives are distinct from verbs can be
attributed to their different semantic properties. We will argue that while some of
the independent behaviour of verb-like adjectives may be due to semantics, there
is still sufficient morphosyntactic evidence to consider verb-like adjectives to be a
distinct lexical class from verbs.