14 R. M. W. Dixon
is often an unwillingness to use the label 'adjectives', simply because these adjec-
tives are so different in grammatical properties from the familiar kind of adjective
occurring in European languages. A term like 'descriptive verb' maybe used instead
(for example, Seki 1990, 2000 on Kamaiura, Tupi-Guarani branch of Tupi fam-
ily). The authors of Chapters 10-14 below do employ the term 'adjective' (although
some did not use this term in earlier work on their language) but, continuing the
tendency just noted, they are reluctant to recognize them as a major word class,
preferring instead to treat adjectives as a sub-class of verbs. (This is discussed fur-
ther in §11.)
Oceanic languages typically have an adjective class similar in grammatical
properties to the verb class. Buse (1965), writing on Rarotongan, called them 'sta-
tives' and this label (or 'stative verbs') has become institutionalized in Oceanic lin-
guistics (see, for example, Chapter 11 below).
In Chapter 3, Genetti and Hildebrandt provide an excellent discussion of the
two adjective classes in Manange. They refer to them as 'verb-like adjectives' and
'adjectives'. The 'adjective' class has properties in common with nouns and could
well have been labelled 'noun-like adjectives'; the simple label 'adjectives' may have
been preferred because this class, in its noun-like properties, is similar to adjective
classes in the familiar languages of Europe.
It should be noted that some instances of what I call an 'adjective class' are not
accorded this label in the grammars from which I take the data. Nevertheless,
they should each be labelled 'adjective class' according to the criteria used in this
study—a word class distinct from noun and verb, including words from the pro-
totypical adjective semantic types, and (a) functioning either as intransitive predi-
cate or as copula complement; and/or (b) modifying a noun in an NP.
- Criteria for recognizing an adjective class
Adjective classes can be categorized in terms of their grammatical properties. The
primary division is between adjectives that can fill an intransitive predicate slot, as
in (4), and those that fill a copula complement slot, as in (3):
(I) Adjectives which can function as intransitive predicate. These take some or all
of the morphological processes and/or syntactic modifiers which can apply
to a verb when it functions as intransitive predicate. They can be called 'verb-
like adjectives'.
(II) Adjectives which may fill the copula complement slot. They can be called
'non-verb-like adjectives'.
Note that there are a few languages in which a plain, underived adjective can
fill both intransitive predicate and copula complement slots. This was illustrated in
(ia/b), for Tariana. Other examples are mentioned in §6.3, which deals with adjec-
tives that share the grammatical properties of verbs and of nouns. And there are