On the nature of adjectives: evidence from Dinka

Abstract

This paper presents a description of the adjective class in Dinka, and an exploration of its typological relevance to the existence of adjectives cross-linguistically. In Dinka, a subset of intransitive verbs can be defined by two morphophonological characteristics. The overwhelming majority of these are property concepts, despite the fact that the defining characteristics are unrelated to semantic properties. This calls into question whether or not properties provide a useful semantic context in the investigation of adjectives, even in languages where the adjective class is clearly a subclass of another lexical category. While the analysis is based primarily on the Bor South dialect of Dinka, it has been corroborated using evidence from other dialects. Therefore, it is likely that this characterization holds across the language.

Keywords

• Dinka
• adjectives
• property concepts
• lexical categories
• non-concatenative morphology