10 Is THERE AN ADJECTIVE CLASS IN WOLOF?
Fiona Me Laughlin
- Introduction
One of the striking characteristics of many Niger-Congo languages is the small
set of underived adjectives that they possess. Igbo, for example, has only eight un-
derived adjectives which occur as antonym pairs (Welmers 1973:259; Dixon 1982:4),
while Ewe has only five (see Ameka 2002). In some languages, such as Akan, words
with an adjectival function are barely distinguishable from nouns, while in others,
such as Yoruba, they resemble verbs (Welmers 1973: 255-7). Remarking on the lat-
ter type, Creissels (2000: 249-50) adds that 'Wolof illustrates the borderline case
of a language that properly speaking does not have a category "adjective", and in
which even notions most typically encoded through adjectival lexemes are encod-
ed through lexemes that fulfil the predicate function in exactly the same way as typ-
ically verbal lexemes' Lexical items most likely to be adjectives on a semantic basis
behave in an overwhelmingly verb-like manner in Wolof. They function as intransi-
tive predicates and not as copula complements, and they modify nouns in an NP
within relative clause constructions. While verb-like adjectivals are found widely in
the worlds languages, in Chapter i Dixon proposes that all languages have an adjec-
tival class that is in some way distinct from other word classes in a given language,
thereby predicting that adjectivals in languages like Wolof will exhibit some behav-
iour, however subtle, that sets them apart from other verbs. In a recent discussion of
adjectives in sub-Saharan languages, Creissels (2003) points out an important, and
indeed subtle, difference in Wolof between non-adjectival verbs and prototypical-
ly adjectival verbs like njool 'tall' or xonq 'red'. The difference occurs in the position
of the definite article in relative clauses that modify nouns. In their indefinite forms
the noun phrases have the same structure, as shown in examples (i) and (2), where
(i) contains an adjectival verb and (2) does not. The relative marker is /Cu/ where C
is a noun class marker that shows concord with the noun.^1
(^1) Unless otherwise indicated, all Wolof examples in this chapter are from a large corpus of nat-
urally occurring discourse recorded in Senegal between 1989 and 2002, or have been elicited from
Wolof speakers. I especially thank Mame Selbee Diouf, Thierno Seydou Sail, and Cheikh Thiam for
their grammaticality judgements and discussion of their intuitions about adjectival verbs in Wolof.
I would like to thank the participants in the International Workshop on Adjective Classes held at