4 The Adjective Class in Tariana 121TABLE 10. Syntactic properties of adjectives compared with nouns and verbs
Verb Adjective NounHead of intransitive predicate Yes: A=Sa; Sa, S 0 , Sio Yes: restricted categories
Head of transitive predicate Yes (some) No No
Head of NP No Yes
Modifier in NP No Yes No
Modifier of a verb No Yes: some No
Copula complement No Yes
- means that certain morphological or syntactic processes have to be applied for a member of the
given word class to appear in this function.
(34) inari ma:tfite-pu-na
mucura.ratbad:NCL.ANiM-AUG-REM.p.vis
"The mucura rat was nasty (he bit me)'
(35) diha ma:tfite-nuku nhupa-na ...
ART bad:NCL.ANIM-TOP.NON.SUBJECT lSg:grab-REM.P.VIS
'I grabbed the bad one ...'
Similarly to nouns, adjectives can be used as copula complements:
(36) diha ma:tfite-pu di-dia-pidana
he bad:NCL.ANiM-AUG 3sgnf-become-REM.p.REP
'He became bad'
A member of any word class, a noun phrase, or a clause can be employed as a
modifier. To be used this way, it has to take a noun class marker. These derived
modifiers have all the properties of the derived adjectives listed in Table 7 (except
that they cannot take the approximative morpheme at all). For instance, if a noun
phrase is used as a modifier of a noun, a noun class marker is attached to the last
word of the noun phrase to mark agreement with the head noun, as in (15) above.
An example of a possessive construction employed as a modifier, with a noun class
suffix marking agreement with the head, is in (37).
(37) heku-na [wesi i-tape]-na
chestnut.tree-CL.VERT [flu iNDEF-medicine]-NCL.VERT
'tree which is a medicine against flu'
Other examples of noun phrases or even clauses used as modifiers ('adjectivized'
with a noun class suffix as an agreement marker) include Ifari wesi hanupite (man
[mucus much]:NCL.ANiM) 'a man who has much mucus' (or 'a man with a runny
nose'), Ifari ka-kama-hanupite (man [REL-drinkmuch]-NCL.ANiM) 'a much-drink-
ing man, a drunkard', nawiki [tfinu kayu]-peni (person [dog like]-PL.ANiM) 'people