Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 289–304
The Osage language is shown to have a lexical category Adjective based primarily on morphological and secondarily on syntactic evidence. The hypothesis with the most currency is that Siouan predicates are either active or stative verbs, and that given the lack of distinguishing morphology, adjectives cannot be classified as separate from stative verbs. I show that Osage treats adjectives differently from stative verbs in compound formation, in noun phrase modification, as clausal predicates, and in the exponence of Scale. The number of predicates that could be thus classified as adjectives seems to be larger than those in some other Siouan languages such as Hocąk and Lakota.