Syntax, Semantics, and Typology of Adjectives in Upper Necaxa Totonac

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Beck, David

• Individual members of the Totonacan family - a group of at least four languages spoken in East Central Mexico - have been claimed to either lack adjectives or to have only a restricted, closed class of adjectives, words expressing property concepts belonging to the class ofnoun. The basisfor this claim stemsfrom the lack of inflectional distinctions between nouns and words denoting property concepts, äs well äs a certain degree ofoverlap in their distribution, most notably the use of property concepts äs syntactic actants. An investigation of the syntactic behaviour of property-concept words in Upper Necaxa Totonac, however, reveals that while these share a number of important grammatical properties with nouns, they are clearly differentiable from nouns on a number of morphosyntactic grounds related to their semantically predicative nature.

• Date created

  2000

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Word classes
  • Markedness
  • Property concepts
  • Nouns
  • Totonac
  • Parts of speech
  • Adjectives
  • Modification
  • Iconicity
  • Predicates

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R33B5WK3Z

• License

  © Walter de Gruyter