<Articles>Where have all the adjectives gone? The case of Jinghpaw

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  • Kurabe Keita
    東京外国語大学アジア・アフリカ言語文化研究所

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  • <研究論文>形容詞はどこへ行ったか?ジンポー語の事例
  • Where have all the adjectives gone? The case of Jinghpaw

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The size of the adjective class varies from language to language. The aim of this paper is to investigate the membership of the adjective class in Jinghpaw, a Tibeto-Burman language, showing that Jinghpaw has a small closed class of adjectives consisting of no more than a dozen members. Building upon my own data collected through fieldwork in northern Burma, this paper further investigates the properties of Jinghpaw adjectives in terms of word class, semantics, and syntax. In terms of word class, Jinghpaw adjectives can best be treated as a subtype of verbs based on the fact that they share a number of properties with other verbs, including negatability, mood and aspect marking, and semantic compatibility with degree expressions. In terms of semantics, Jinghpaw adjectives fall into the four core semantic types of adjectives (i.e., dimension, age, value, color) that adjectives in languages with small adjective classes tend to have. Other semantic types such as physical property and human propensity tend to be lexicalized as stative verbs in the language. In terms of syntax, Jinghpaw adjectives exhibit predication and modification functions, which are common functions of adjectives in the world's languages.

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  • 京都大学言語学研究

    京都大学言語学研究 38 29-47, 2019-12-31

    Departmental of Linguistics, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University

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