160 Paulette Levy
The items for 'circular' and for 'round, oval' show that originally the suffixes had
different shades of meaning (see Levy looib for discussion). Items expressing
HUMAN PROPENSITY are basically verbs and deverbative items (see §3.6). In my
database, only a few are 'adjective-shaped.' I list them in (25).
(25) HUMAN PROPENSITY
(a) Reduplicated last syllable
aqsqalala 'intelligent'
ka'mama courageous'
(b) With the suffix -(n)k/qVa (')
Ihmunqa glutton
tli'waqa 'strong, wilful'
Monomorphemic adjectives and 'adjective-shaped' ones are the core of the adjec-
tival category not only by morphological criteria, but also because they behave
alike with respect to all the diagnostics. AGE, DIMENSION, and HUMAN PROPENSITY
all have peculiarities that distinguish them from the best exemplars of the class.
3.3. SOUND SYMBOLISM
The careful reader must by now have realized that many adjectival concepts in
(24)-(26) have variants in which certain sound variations correlate with differ-
ences in meaning related to intensity. Sound symbolism, in three series, fricatives,
/s, x, lh/, affricates /c, ch, tl/, and velars /k, g/, is a pervasive but frozen process in
the whole family (see Bishop 1984, Levy 1987:115-30). For the varieties where it is
claimed that nouns and adjectives are indistinguishable syntactically, the natural
hypothesis is that sound-symbolically related items denoting entities will differ se-
mantically as to size, while sound-symbolically related items denoting properties
will differ semantically in the dimension of intensity, since property concepts are
inherently gradable. This prediction holds, as the examples in (26) show.
(26) (a) Some PT nouns related by sound symbolism
suku' 'small hole, perforation
Ihuku' 'hole'
Ihuqu' 'cave'
(b) Coatepec (McQuown 1990)
makstulululh (n.) 'a small ball'
maklhtulululh (n.) 'a large ball' (p. 67)
smulut (n.) 'small arch'
xmulut (n.) 'large arch' (p. 67)
cacuqu 'reddish, pale red'
chachuqu 'dark red' (p. 67)
smukuku 'light yellow'
Ihmukuku 'dark yellow' (p. 128)
qawiwi? 'cold'
sqawiwi? 'cool' (p. 127)