Rara #143

Legacy number: 143

 Number  143
 Phenomenon  only a single adjective – that is, one item of a word class distinct from other word classes (in particular nouns and verbs) and comparable to a word class of adjectives in other languages
 Found in  Toqabaqita (Austronesian, spoken in the Solomon Islands)
 Domain  syntax — word classes
 Type  rarissimum
 Keywords  adjective
 Source  Lichtenberk, Frantisek (2000). The lone adjective of Toqabaqita. Paper at the Parts of Speech conference, Helsinki.

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Discussion
Notes
That lone adjective is ?small, little (in size or quantity)?. Diachronically, its source appears to be a noun meaning ?child?. Its opposite, ?big?, is expressed through the noun ?mother? (or archaically, ?father?). The distinctive morphosyntactic properties of the lone adjective include the inability to be used predicatively, the use in NPs as modifier of a head noun preceding it (unlike nouns and verbs used attributively, which follow the head), incipient agreement in number, animacy, count/mass. While it is possible for lgs not to have any adjectives, it has been claimed that the minimum is ?about five? once they have that category (Dixon 1994: 34). Dixon, R. M. W. (1994). Adjectives. In R. E. Asher (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, 29-35. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Comment
Frans Plank · 21 Sep 2006
That lone adjective is 'small, little (in size or quantity)'. Diachronically, its source appears to be a noun meaning 'child'. Its opposite, 'big', is expressed through the noun 'mother' (or archaically, 'father').
The distinctive morphosyntactic properties of the lone adjective include the inability to be used predicatively, the use in NPs as modifier of a head noun preceding it (unlike nouns and verbs used attributively, which follow the head), incipient agreement in number, animacy, count/mass.

While it is possible for lgs not to have any adjectives, it has been claimed that the minimum is "about five" once they have that category (Dixon 1994: 34).

Dixon, R. M. W. (1994). Adjectives. In R. E. Asher (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, 29-35. Oxford: Pergamon Press.