264 Catriona Hyslop
(2) No=mo gani na mena.
isgSP=REAL eat ACC ripe
'I am eating a ripe (banana).'
A noun can function syntactically as either a head of an NP or as a modifier of a
noun in an NP. An NP can be: a subject or object in a verbal clause; an object of a
preposition; a locative adjunct; the subject or complement of a non-verbal clause;
or an extra-clausal topic. Verbs form the head of a VP, which can be either an in-
transitive or transitive predicate. Adjectives are a sub-class of verbs, distinguished
from other sub-classes largely on the basis that apart from functioning as the head
of a VP, they can also modify nouns in an NP.
3. The class 'adjective'
Adjectives in Ambae constitute a medium-sized open class. The fact that the class
is open is evidenced by the fact that loans can be incorporated into this class. Some
examples of borrowings that have come from English via Bislama^1 are girake 'crazy,
stupid', nambawani great, excellent', and olfala 'old'. The adjective class has approx-
imately 100 underived members and contains words from nine of the thirteen
semantic types recognized by Dixon (Chapter i, this volume) (§6).
3.1. ADJECTIVES AS A SUB-CLASS OF VERBS
In Ambae adjectives are a sub-class of verbs. I have previously referred to this sub-
class of intransitive verbs as stative-inchoative verbs (Hyslop 2001). This sub-class
could equally be called adjectival verbs, verb-like adjectives, or simply adjectives.
What is important to state is that there is a class of words in the language whose
members can function either as the predicate in an intransitive clause, making a
statement about a property of an object, or as a modifier of the head noun in an
NP. As words in this class can occur as the head of a VP and share many proper-
ties of verbs, they must be classified as a sub-class of verbs. However, due to the
fact that they function differently from words in the sub-class of active intransitive
verbs, and have many properties that adjectives generally possess, they must be es-
tablished as a separate sub-class. I will here refer to that sub-class as adjectives.
3.2. VERB CLASSES
Considering that adjectives in Ambae are a sub-class of verbs, I would firstly like
to look at the different sub-classes of verbs found in the language and discuss the
criteria used for establishing these sub-classes. This will demonstrate the fact that
while adjectives must clearly be classified as verbs, the evidence for setting them
up as a separate sub-class also indicates why this sub-class should be called adjec-
tives.
(^1) Bislama is the national language of Vanuatu, an English lexifier pidgin/creole.