Information

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Heike Bödeker wrote:
> As for adjectives, as Dixon had pointed out long ago, many languages have
> only a not too large and closed class of true adjectives, ...

And, effectively, essentially all Siouan languages seem to have an
adjective class so closed as to be nonexistant, with essentially all
adjectival modifiers being either (a) objectively inflected verbs
(statives), (b) preposed nouns, or (c) preposed nominalized clauses
(relative clauses).  I say 'essentially all' several times because at
least Biloxi seems to lack stative verbs per se (but doesn't have
adjectives) and I'm not positive that there might not be some Siouan
language with an adjective or two (in some sense), though I don't know of
anything in tha line.

> As for nouns, so far it mostly seems to have been about a combination with
> some kind of predicative suffix. In so far this could be regarded as
> functionally equivalent to the copula in an Aristotelean predication (say
> as opposed to conversion as with English hammer).

Incidentally, Dixon has just published a typology of copulas in
Anthropological Linguistics 44.1 (Spring 2002):  "Copular clauses in
Australian languages:  a typological perspective."

I agree with Heike that there are a number of dimensions to the question
of nouniness vs. verbiness in language.  Stative verbs and predicative use
of nominals is only part of it.  Beside the issues Heike raises, an issue
here is the extent to which a language exhibits nominal vs. verbal
morphology.

To some extent I thought that this might be what David Kaufman was getting
at.  Siouan languages are very short of nominal inflectional and
derivational patterns.  Some form of inalienable possessor marking is
about the only inflectional pattern exhibited widely (and even this is
moribund in languages like Winnebago).  There are usually only a very few
noun to noun derivational patterns.  And typically the mark of
nominalization of verbs (a common event) is zero (excluding the potential
co-occurrence of determiners with the now nominalized verb form).  The
absence of nominalizing morphology leads to the striking absence of
participial and infinitival forms, though copious use of conjunctions and
determiners makes up for this.

JEK