40 R. M. W. Dixon(38) hemmo 'to boil' woleya 'to be boiled'
fahha 'to buy' fayyo 'to be bought'
salu 'to stretch' pilla 'to be stretched'
In Chapter 9, Sohn offers some illuminating remarks on the semantic overlap be-
tween word classes in Korean. He shows that there is overlap between verb and
adjective classes involving just native lexemes, whereas noun/verb and noun/ad-
jective overlaps often involve one native and one loan item (the latter from the
Sino-Korean stratum of vocabulary).
Overall, one would expect semantic overlap between word classes to be found
most commonly in languages which maintain a strict correspondence between
word class and functional slot. Dyirbal is of this type—a noun can only function
as head of an NP (in predicate argument function) and a verb only as head of a
predicate. A language with more fluid class-slot correspondences (such as Noot-
ka, briefly discussed in §3 above) would be less likely to feature semantic overlap
between its word classes.
- The individual studies in this volume
The thirteen chapters which follow each provides a full and insightful character-
ization of the class of adjectives in a language which is of particular interest from
this point of view. Chapters 2-3 describe languages which have two adjective class-
es, differing in some properties but sharing enough features for them each to be
recognized as an adjective class. The adjective class in Chapter 4 shares proper-
ties with both nouns and verbs, while that in Chapter 5 is not particularly close to
either nouns or verbs in its grammatical properties. Chapters 6-8 discuss adjec-
tive classes which are grammatically rather similar to nouns. Then, in Chapters 9-
14, there are descriptions of adjective classes which have grammatical properties
in common with verbs.
Anthony E. Backhouse, in 'Inflected and uninflected adjectives in Japanese'
(Chapter 2) and Carol Genetti and Kristine Hildebrandt, in "The two adjective
classes in Manange' (Chapter 3), expand on the brief summaries provided in §8
above. Each language has a class of verb-like adjectives (called 'inflected adjectives'
by Backhouse) and also a class of noun-like adjectives (called 'uninflected adjec-
tives' by Backhouse, and just 'adjectives' by Genetti and Hildebrandt). For each lan-
guage, the two classes can be grouped together as a bipartite adjective class on the
basis of various shared properties. These authors provide fine-grained studies of
the similarities and differences between grammatical properties of the two classes,
and of how they divide up the adjectival semantic types between them.
"The adjective class in Tariana' by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (Chapter 4)
describes how this Arawak language has a class with just twenty-nine monomor-
phemic members. Adjectives are like verbs in functioning as intransitive predicate
(although with limited TAM possibilities) and like nouns in functioning as cop-