6 Adjectives in Papantla Totonac 171(47) (a) qu'n (adj) 'fat, flabby'
qu'n 'P gets fat'
maqa-qu'n 'A does something, and as a result P gets fat'
(b) qajqa'la (adj) 'slim'
qajqa'la-n 'P slims down, loses weight'
maqa-qajqa'la 'Something, an illness for instance, makes P lose
weight'
(c) staka 'P grows'
maqa-staka 'A does something that causes P to grow'
(48) qu:lu 'old, male human
qu:lun 'P gets old (as a natural process)'
maqa-qu:lu 'Something causes P to get old not naturally
(i.e. an unexpected illness, etc.)'
And recall from §3.6, HUMAN PROPENSITY adjectives like li:pa:xdw, 'that gives joy,
happiness', exemplified in (38), although morphologically derived as nouns, pat-
tern syntactically not with nouns but with adjectives. This might be explained by
the fact that they share with adjectives this same semantic feature: they are pro-
cesses that are conceptualized as happening to an undergoer without the interven-
tion of an agentive outside force.
4.1.3. A second class of intransitive verbsDIMENSION adjectives formed on the three bases meaning 'big', 'small', and 'long',
§3.4 above, and VALUE adjectives, (22) above, do not form inchoative intransitives
with the regular suffix -«. Instead, the deadjectival inchoatives show the suffix -i:,
a marker of transitivization, and the prefix fa-, a detransitivizer, as shown in (49).
(49) akcii 'small' ta-[akcuw-i:] 'S becomes small, shrinks'
qama 'tasty' ta-[qam-i:] 'S becomes tasty'
The derivation suggests that these intransitives are construed as representing events
that are externally caused, and one might hypothesize that since the presence of
ta- signals that although a causing entity cannot be syntactically expressed, some
of the implicatures of Protoagent remain still present in the underlying semantics
of the verb. This is consistent with the fact that the underlying participant in most
of the verbs of change of DIMENSION formed on these three roots is prototypical-
ly inanimate, and change of dimension for an inanimate always entails an external
force. However, there are intransitive verbs, formed in this pattern, whose only par-
ticipant S is semantically animate: ta-lanka'-i:-lh cuqa'wasa (iNGR-big-TR-cpL little,
boy) "The little boy turned big'. This point needs further study; my consultants do
not accept *lankd'-n big-iNCH 'enlarge', but the form is present in Aschmann's (1973)
dictionary. Remember that DIMENSION adjectives also take the nominal plural, be-
sides the DISTRIBUTIVE, so there is clearly something special going on with this
class that needs further study.