6 Adjectives in Papantla Totonac 167liaqatu'y 'untrustworthy, dangerous' (liaqatu'yun 's/he worries about
something')
ta-li:pa:w 'trustworthy, important' (li:pa:wan 's/he trusts him')Nevertheless, in spite of their clear nominal morphology, the items in (38) behave
syntactically like adjectives, as shown by some of the most important adjectival
diagnostics. In (39), they modify the head of an NP directly, i.e. without the inter-
vention of xa-, and they accept the intensifier snu:n 'very' within the NP. In (40),
they occupy the pre-verbal slot as depictive secondary predicates.
(39) kiwanilh [aqtum snu:n li-.laqapuca cwe«to]NP
km-wan-ni-lh aq-tum snu:n
iOBj-say.it-BEN-cpL NUMCL.general-one very
li:-laqapucd-f cuento
iNST-be.sad(Vintr)-NR story
'He told me a very sad story.'
(40) wa:q ta:nqu':lh, li-.laqapuca ktamdqxtaqli
wa:q ta-an-qu':-lh
all 3pl-gO-TERM-CPL
li:-laqapucd-f k-ta-maqxtaq-li
iNST-be.sad(Vintr)-NR i-iNGR-leave.it-cpL
"They all went off, I was left sad.'
All verbs offer the possibility of deriving nouns of instrument, e.g. li:tampd:chi'
'belt' < tampa-.chi' 's/he girds up'. But the syntactic behaviour of the formally dever-
bal nouns of instrument in (38) as adjectives rather than nouns is a consequence of
the semantic class of the verbs. Formal evidence is furnished by inchoativization
and causativization processes, discussed in §4.1.
The other semantic types associated with large adjective classes in some lan-
guages are not adjectives in Totonac.^9
3.7. REGULAR DERIVATION WITH -WA 'THAT HAS THE PROPERTY OF THE BASE
TO SOME EXTENT'
The suffix -wa 'that has the property of the base to some extent' (similar to English
'-ish') is quite productive, unlike the first three morphological processes described
at the beginning of this section, and co-occurs with bases of the four main lexical
categories, nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, as shown in (41).
(41) (a) Denominal:
chi'xit-wa 'hairy' chi'xit 'hair'
chu'chut-wa 'watery' chu'chut 'water'
lhtuku'ni:-wa 'thorny' lhtuku':n 'thorns'
(^9) SPEED, DIFFICULTY, SIMILARITY, and QUANTIFICATION notions are expressed by adverbs. POS-
ITION is expressed either by adverbs, stative verbs, or verbs formed by an adverb plus a light verb.