Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Lexical Categories and The Status of Descriptives in Apinajé

2003; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/381336

1545-7001

Christiane Cunha de Oliveira,

Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

The category membership of words expressing adjectival meanings (Descriptives) in Macro‐Jê languages has been a topic of recent interest and dispute among researchers. While there is agreement about the absence of Adjective as a word class, there is disagreement on whether Descriptives should be analyzed as a subclass of Nouns or Verbs, since Descriptives share features with both. This study devises a set of internal criteria for establishing the category membership of Descriptives in Apinajé (Jê family). Morphosyntactic properties common to Nouns, Verbs, and Descriptives are explored first, showing that valid arguments can be made in favor of alternative analyses of Descriptives, or against a categorical distinction between Nouns and Verbs. Against this background, further syntactic constructions, such as relativization and imperatives, are introduced; these support a categorical distinction between Nouns and Verbs, and lead to the conclusion that Descriptives do constitute a subclass of Verbs.