Affiliation:
1. University of Edinburgh
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.
Publisher
Open Library of the Humanities
Reference28 articles.
1. The Phonemic System of Agar Dinka;Andersen, Torben;Journal of African Languages and Linguistics,1987
2. Subject and topic in Dinka;Andersen, Torben;Studies in Language,1991
3. Morphological stratification in Dinka: On the alternations of voice quality, vowel length and tone in the morphology of transitive verbal roots in a monosyllabic language;Andersen, Torben;Studies in African Linguistics,1992–1994
4. Vowel Quality Alternation in Dinka Verb Inflection;Andersen, Torben;Phonology,1993
5. Case inflection and nominal head marking in Dinka;Andersen, Torben;Journal of African Languages and Linguistics,2002