Article published in:
The Lexicon–Syntax Interface: Perspectives from South Asian languages
Edited by Pritha Chandra and Richa Srishti
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 209] 2014
► pp. 25–52

Property concepts and the apparent lack of adjectives in Dravidian

| University of Southern California

Dravidian lacks an adjective category lexically and neither does it derive one in the syntax. The primary data comes from Malayalam where unlike what previous accounts suggest (Bhat 1994; Amritavalli & Jayaseelan 2003; Jayaseelan 2007), the lexicon comprises of uninflected primitive roots (Marantz 1997; Borer 2003). These roots are property concept roots and they combine with null verbal and nominal heads to derive structures. The syntax derives structures, which in English-type languages would be expressed with an adjective. Relativization and nominalization are the two routes to arrive at meanings expressed by adjectives in other languages.

Keywords: adjective, Dravidian, feature sharing, nominalization, relativization
Published online: 25 March 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.209.02men
References
Amritavalli, Raghavachari
2008 The origins of functional and lexical categories: Tense-aspect and adjectives in Dravidian. Nanzan Linguistics 4: 1–20.Google Scholar
Amritavalli, Raghavachari & Jayaseelan, Karattuparambil A
2003 The genesis of syntactic categories and parametric variation. Paper presented at the 4th Asian GLOW Colloquium at Seoul, August 2003.
Anandan, Kaattuparambil Narayanan
1985 Predicate Nominals in English and Malayalam. M.Phil Dissertation, CIEFL: Hyderabad.Google Scholar
Baker, Mark
2003 Verbal adjectives as adjectives without phi-features. In Proceedings of the Fourth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics , Yukio Otsu (ed.), 1–22. Keio University.Google Scholar
2005  Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bhat, D.N. Shankara
1994  The Adjectival Category: Criteria for Differentiation and Identification . Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Borer, Hagit
2003 Exo-skeletal vs. endo-skeletal explanations: Syntactic projections and the lexicon. In The Nature of Explanation , M. Polinsky & J. Moore (eds), 31–67. Chicago: Chicago University Press (distributed by CSLI).Google Scholar
Caponigro, Ivano & Polinksy, Maria
2008 Almost everything is relative in the Caucasus. Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 18 , Amherst, MA.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Caponigro, Ivan & Polinsky, Maria
2011 Relative embeddings: A Circassian puzzle for the syntax/semantics interface. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29(1): 71–122. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1970 Remarks on nominalization. In Readings in English Transformational Grammar . R. Jacobs & P. Rosenbaum (eds), 184–221. Waltham, MA: Blaisdell.Google Scholar
Corver, Nobert
2009 Getting the (syntactic) measure of measure phrases. The Linguistic Review 26(1): 67–134. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Frampton, John & Gutmann, Sam
2006 How sentences grow in the mind: Agreement and selection in efficient minimalist syntax. In Agreement Systems , Cedric Boeckx (ed.), 121–157. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Groenendijk, Joroen & Stokhof, Martin
1982 Semantic analysis of Wh-complements. Linguistics and Philosophy 5(2): 175–233.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Kenneth & Keyser, Samuel Jay
1993 On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger , S. Hale & S. Keyser (eds), 53–110. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Marantz, Alec
1993 Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger , Ken Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds), 111–176. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jayaseelan, Karattuparambil A
2007 The argument structure of the dative construction. In Argument Structure , E. Reuland, T. Bhattacharya & G. Spathas (eds), 37–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 Coordination and finiteness in Dravidian. Invited talk at FiSaL in Universitat of Tromsø, June 09–10 2011.Google Scholar
Kim, Min-Joo
2002 Does Korean have Adjectives. Ms. Umass Amherst.Google Scholar
Koontz-Garboden, Andrew & Francez, Itamar
2010 Possessed properties in Ulwa. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory , 197–240.Google Scholar
Krishnamurthi, Bhadriraju
2003  The Dravidian Languages . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Laughlin, Fiona
2004 Is There an adjective class in Wolof? In Adjective Classes: A Cross Linguistic Typology , R.M.W. Dixon & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds), 242–262. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marantz, Alec
1997 No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium: Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 4: 2, Alexis Dimitriadis et al.. (ed.), 201–225.
Menon, Mythili
2012 Adverbial comparatives: Evidence from Malayalam. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16 vol. 2, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics , Ana Aguilar, Anna Chernilovskya & Rick Nouwen (eds), 461–474. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
2013 Comparison in the Absence of Adjectives: The Case of Malayalam. Talk at FASAL 3, University of Southern California. March 9–10 2013.Google Scholar
Miyagawa, Shigeru
1987 Lexical categories in Japanese. Lingua 73: 29–51. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ohkado, Masayuki
1991 On the status of adjectival nouns in Japanese. Lingua 83: 67–82. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pesetsky, David & Torrego, Esther
2007 The syntax of valuation and the interpretability of features. In Phrasal and Clausal Architecture , S. Karimi, V. Samiian & W. Wilkins (eds), 1–31 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, Muffy
1980  Capturing the Adjective . New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Sproat, Richard & Shih, Chilin
1991 The cross-linguistic distribution of adjective ordering restrictions. In Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language , C. Georgopoulos & R. Ishihara (eds), 565–593. Dordrecht: Kluwer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Watanabe, Akira
2011 Adjectival inflection and the position of measure phrases. Linguistic Inquiry 42, 490–507. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Washio, Ryuichi
1997 Resultatives, compositionality and language variation. Journal of East Asian Languages 6: 1–49. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zvelebil, Kamil
1990  Dravidian Linguistics: An Introduction . Pondicherry, India: PILC(Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture).Google Scholar