12 R. M. W. Dixon
in which, at first blush, nouns and verbs appear to function alike; however, in every
instance, a careful and detailed examination of the grammar reveals a number of
fairly subtle but absolutely robust criteria for distinguishing two word classes. In
a rather larger number of languages, there appears, on superficial examination, to
be no grammatical difference between adjective and verb, or none between adjec-
tive and noun. But, in every instance, when the situation is investigated in depth, it
transpires that there are some—often rather subtle—criteria to distinguish adjec-
tive as a separate word class.
5. Attitudes towards adjectives
It has sometimes been suggested that having an adjective class is not a univer-
sal property of human languages. In an earlier study (Dixon 19773: 20; 1982: 2),
I opined that 'some languages have no adjective class at all'. The present chapter—
building on a further quarter-century of research—puts forward the hypothesis
that an adjective class can be recognized for every language, although sometimes
the criteria for distinguishing adjectives from nouns, or adjectives from verbs, are
rather subtle.
Adjectives had been said to be absent from Totonac languages but, applying
the principles outlined in this chapter, Levy (Chapter 6) provides a wealth of cri-
teria for distinguishing adjectives as a separate class. In her Ph.D. dissertation on
Semelai, Kruspe (1999) did not mention adjectives; applying the criteria from this
chapter, she now (Chapter 12) recognizes adjectives as a well-defined sub-class of
verbs. Some reputable scholars have stated that adjectives cannot be distinguished
from verbs in Korean; the indisputable status of an adjective class in this language
is demonstrated by Sohn, in Chapter 9. There had been a tradition of saying that
Chinese has no adjective class; as mentioned below, clear and unequivocal cri-
teria are now apparent for the recognition of 'adjective' as a major word class in
Mandarin.
Both the ancient grammar of Sanskrit by Panini and the early grammars of
Greek and Latin—which began the western tradition—failed to make any distinc-
tion between noun and adjective. It was only at about 1300 CE, in the scholastic
grammar of Thomas of Erfurt, that the criterion of gender was invoked—each
noun has one inherent gender, whereas an adjective has no gender in itself but may
show any of the genders, by agreement with the noun it relates to. On the basis of
the European languages they knew, it became the accepted doctrine among lin-
guists that adjectives are a class with similar morphology to nouns, differing from
nouns in terms of gender possibilities. Indeed, it appears that Jespersen (1924: 72)
considered this to be the only criterion. Since Finnish has no genders, he inferred
that in this language adjectives could not be distinguished from nouns. There are,
in fact, a fair number of other relevant criteria in Finnish—only nouns (not adjec-
tives) take possessive suffixes, and only adjectives (not nouns) take comparative
and superlative suffixes.