7 THE SMALL ADJECTIVE CLASS IN JARAWARA
R. M. W. Dixon
Jarawara has a small closed class of adjectives, for which fourteen members are
attested. The adjectives are non-verb-like, functioning as modifier within an NP
and as copula complement. They show some similarities with inalienably pos-
sessed nouns in that both can function as modifier within an NP. However, there
are a number of clear criteria for distinguishing between the classes (for example, a
possessed noun cannot, on its own, function as copula complement). There is also
some superficial similarity between adjectives and the nominalized forms of verbs
but, when examined in detail, these too can be distinguished.^1
Jarawara (spoken by about 150 people spread over seven small villages in the
dense jungle of southern Amazonia), together with co-dialects Jamamadi (c.ipo
speakers) and Banawa (c.go speakers), make up the Madi language, belonging to
the Arawa family (quite distinct from Arawak); the other extant languages in the
family are Paumari, Kulina-Deni, and Sorowaha; see Dixon (1999). It appears that
each Arawa language has a small closed class of adjectives, some of which are cog-
nate between languages and others non-cognate.
This is a highly synthetic language, basically agglutinative but with developing
fusion. Jarawara is head-marking, with the predicate—which includes pronom-
inal specification of core arguments—being the only obligatory element within a
(^1) My major debt is to the Jarawara people who have welcomed me as a temporary member of
their community, worked at teaching me their language, and answered all of my questions—Okomo-
bi, Mioto, Soki, Kamo, Botenawaa, Kakai, Wero, and others. Alan Vogel is collaborating with me on a
grammar of Jarawara and we have discussed many of the points in this paper. Alexandra Aikhenvald
provided most useful comments on a draft of the paper.
Jarawara has just four vowels (i, e, a, and o) with contrastive length, and eleven consonants: bila-
bial b, $ (written as/), and m; apico-dental t and n; apico-alveolar s and r (with allophones [r] and
[1]), lamino-palatal stop j (written as j, with semi-vowel allophone [y]), dorso-velar k and w, and a
nasalized glottal fricative written as h. There is also a glottal stop, / (written as') which only appears
between vowels at the boundary between phonological words within a grammatical word;'.' is used
as the marker of such a boundary. Note that proto-Madi had a contrast between d and t; this is re-
tained in the Jamamadi and Banawa dialects, but has been neutralized, to t, in Jarawara. Full details
of the reconstructed phonology for proto-Arawa, and changes during the development of modern
languages, are in Dixon (1995,2oo4b).