The Placement of Adjectives in Pashto with Regard to their Change in Meaning

Abstract

This paper examines Pashto adjectives to delineate their placement and order with respect to their morphological change and modification of meaning. The aim of this paper is to address the occurrence of Pashto adjectives at the initial, middle, and final positions at the sentence level. Furthermore, the main focus in these occurrences is to find the prenominal initial, prenominal middle, postnominal middle, and final positions of Pashto adjectives at the sentence level. For doing this, the researchers collected data from native speakers and focused on adjectives and their use in sentences. They also read different written materials and found adjectives at various positions. The finding of the study showed that three adjective orders are correct and normal in Pashto, including prenominal initial, prenominal middle, and postnominal medial adjective orders. The results also showed that the postnominal position of an adjective is rarely found in spoken, but not in written at the final position of a sentence. In addition to it, the postnominal adjective of Pashto brings emphasis to the sentence, causes incorrect syntactic order, and also affects the meaning of the sentence.