174 Paulette Levy
of weather conditions constitutes an extremely rich semantic field, all of its items
being verbs and their derivations. (52) gives the items for 'it is cold/he is cold' and
'it is hot/he is hot'.
(52) lunq-ndn 'it is cold' lhka:k-ndn 'it is hot'
k-lunq-a 'I am cold' k-lhka:k-a 'I am hot'
i-be.cold-iNCPL i-be.hot-iCFL
There is only one term that I have identified as the unmarked name for most of
the dimensions, the superordinate, and it is xli:kcund, which means 'size' and not
'smallness'. It can be used to ask for any of the dimensions. Notice that, contrary to
expectations from Indo-European languages, the unmarked term is not formed on
'large, big' but on 'small'.
There are, therefore, two differences in the semantic organization of the lexi-
con in this domain with respect to Spanish. In Spanish, not all qualities will have
their respective abstract noun of quality. There is no common noun for the qual-
ity expressed by most colours, so from rojo 'red' there is no *rojura 'redness'. On
the other hand, in languages like English and Spanish there will be many nouns
expressing the superordinate name of the qualities: 'colour', 'age', 'dimension, etc.
With the exception for the word for size', no such superordinates are found in PT.
5 Conclusion
In this chapter I have shown that adjectives are clearly distinguished from nouns
in Totonacan, in spite of claims to the contrary in the literature. I have shown that,
for PT, they can be distinguished by syntactic, morphological, and semantic cri-
teria, both from verbs and especially from nouns. It is plausible that a second-
ary development, the extension of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic functions
of an originally genitive-like particle, the specifier xa-, was one of the factors that
made the distinction between adjectives and nouns clearer both for PT and UNT,
but further investigation of the diachronic processes is in order. I have also shown
more subtle diagnostics for identifying adjectives in both Coatepec and Misant-
la Totonac, the Totonacan languages for which there were claims in the literature
that adjectives were indistinguishable formally from nouns: co-occurence with the
intensifier 'very', semantic correlations in sound-symbolically related items, and
techniques of pluralization distinguishing them from nouns. This lends support
to Dixon's suggestion that if we refine our techniques for identifying adjectives, it
might well be that the class is much more common in the languages of the world
than once thought.
References
AISSEN, J. 2001. Notes for the 'Taller sobre la predication'. San Cristobal de las Casas, Chia-
pas, 6-14 August.