Proto-Oceanic Adjectival Categories and Their Morphosyntax

Abstract

Probably all languages have at least one adjectival category, that is, a word class whose typical function is attribution, but, as Dixon (I977) has shown, languages vary considerably in the ways in which this category is related to other categories (especially nouns and verbs) and in the number of adjectival categories that the language possesses. In this paper, I present a typology of the morphosyntactic behavior of Oceanic languages with regard to adjectival categories, showing that there is considerable cross-linguistic variation among them. I then ask how one can reconstruct the behavior of Proto-Oceanic from such varying data and propose a reconstruction of Proto-Oceanic adjectival categories. This entails two adjectival categories, one a small closed category whose members were somewhat nounlike, the other a much larger category of adjectival verbs that served both as modifiers of nouns and as stative verbs.