Adjective Classes - A Cross-Linguistic Typology

2O2 Greville G. Corbett

(4) Distribution and expression of morphosyntactic features (Vonen 1997: 69)

Case

Number

Gender

Animacy

Degree

Person

Tense

Voice

Mood

Aspect

Noun

choice

choice

inherent

inherent

no

(inherent 3)

no

no

no

no

Adjective

agreement

agreement

agreement

agreement

(choice)

no

no

no

no

no

Finite verb

no

agreement

agreement

no

no

agreement

choice

choice

choice

inherent

(PAST only)

(NON-PAST only)

The overlaps with other categories are evident.^3 Like the noun, but unlike the finite
verb, the adjective expresses case. Like the verb, it expresses the nominal categor-
ies of number and gender through agreement. On the evidence so far, the adjective
appears rather 'noun-like'. Note, however, that the verb shows agreement in person
and number in the present and future, and agreement in number and gender in
the past (historically a participle). This point will be relevant when we come to the
short form adjective below, where we shall see some additional verb-like proper-
ties of the adjective.
We now turn to the expression of these features through inflectional morph-
ology. A typical paradigm of the long form is given in (5):

(5) Paradigm of the long form adjective (traditional presentation): novyj 'new'

Nominative

Accusative

Genitive

Dative

Instrumental

Locative

Masculine

novyj

as NOM/GEN

novogo

novomu

novym

novom

Feminine

novaja

novuju

novoj

novoj

novoj (u)

novoj

Neuter

novoe

novoe

novogo

novomu

novym

novom

Plural

novye

as NOM/GEN

novyx

novym

novymi

novyx

Not only are the feature specifications different from those of nouns (see (4) above),
the inflections typically differ too. For instance, two classes of nouns maybe femi-
nine, and their nominative singular is in -a or the bare stem. The traditional adjec-
tival paradigm^4 has many more cells than there are distinct phonological forms,

problem' can be found in Pustet (1989:11-26). For recent work on languages without adjectives see
Francis and Matthews (2005).^3 The relation to adverbs is discussed briefly at the end of §6.

(^4) A truly traditional presentation has the accusative ordered after the dative, which obscures some