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Re-discovering the Quechua adjective

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Published/Copyright: September 5, 2011
Linguistic Typology
From the journal Volume 15 Issue 1

Abstract

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. It is concluded that by virtually any standard Quechua shows clear evidence for a distinct class of attributive noun modifiers, and that in the future Quechua should not be considered a “flexible” noun/adjective language for the purposes of crosslinguistic comparison.

Keywords:: adjectives; anaphora; attribution; compounds; ellipsis; inflection; nouns; Quechua; syntax; word classes
Author's address: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Received: 2010-06-28
Revised: 2011-01-07
Published Online: 2011-09-05
Published in Print: 2011-June

©Walter de Gruyter

Articles in the same Issue

  1. The Georg von der Gabelentz Award 2009
  2. The tapestry of Dolakha Newar: Chaining, embedding, and the complexity of sentences
  3. Re-discovering the Quechua adjective
  4. Exploiting word order to express an inflectional category: Reality status in Iquito
  5. Quantifying areality: A study of prenasalisation in Southeast Asia and New Guinea
  6. The locative syntax of experiencers, by Idan Landau
  7. Secondary predicates in Eastern European languages and beyond, edited by Christoph Schroeder, Gerd Hentschel & Winfried Boeder
  8. A typology of verbal borrowings, by Jan Wohlgemuth
https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.2011.003
Keywords for this article
adjectives; anaphora; attribution; compounds; ellipsis; inflection; nouns; Quechua; syntax; word classes

Articles in the same Issue

  1. The Georg von der Gabelentz Award 2009
  2. The tapestry of Dolakha Newar: Chaining, embedding, and the complexity of sentences
  3. Re-discovering the Quechua adjective
  4. Exploiting word order to express an inflectional category: Reality status in Iquito
  5. Quantifying areality: A study of prenasalisation in Southeast Asia and New Guinea
  6. The locative syntax of experiencers, by Idan Landau
  7. Secondary predicates in Eastern European languages and beyond, edited by Christoph Schroeder, Gerd Hentschel & Winfried Boeder
  8. A typology of verbal borrowings, by Jan Wohlgemuth
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