18
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Which non-Indoeuropean languages have noun-adjective agreement?
Egyptian and many of the older Semitic languages put a /t/ on feminine nouns and any adjectives modifying them, and many also mark number (singular, dual, plural) on both. A few of these languages (e....
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15
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Which non-Indoeuropean languages have noun-adjective agreement?
In the Atlantic-Congo languages that have noun classes, and that is most of them, adjectives agree in the class with the noun they modify.
In the Bantu subfamily, the adjectives agrees by receiving ...
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12
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Why do adjectives come before nouns in English?
The short answer to why we say "a tall tree" and not "a tree tall" is that we learned this pattern from listening to other people speaking; and those people got their rules from their elders, and so ...
- 81.9k
8
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Why do adjectives come before nouns in English?
It's perhaps not entirely accurate to say 'most languages'. In several Indo-European languages, the adjective comes before the noun too. E.g. in Russian - 'белая машина' is 'white car', but the other ...
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8
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Which non-Indoeuropean languages have noun-adjective agreement?
In Finnish, adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in terms of case and number.
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7
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What is it called when one "conjugates" adjectives?
As curiousdannii said, it's a type of inflection.
In Latin, adjectives were traditionally classified as nouns (nomina; specifically nomina adjectiva); the nouns that weren't adjectives were called "...
- 17.8k
7
votes
Why do adjectives come before nouns in English?
"Why" is always a difficult question to answer in linguistics. Sometimes, the best we can say is "it's just the way things are": in some languages (English, Russian, Ancient Greek, Hittite, Japanese), ...
- 63.8k
6
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How is the the adjective in a definite noun phrase different from a nondefinite one in Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages?
The adjective systems in Balto-Slavic and German languages are similar only from a very broad typological and historical point of view.
Most Slavic languages — I can speak about Russian, but it must ...
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6
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Different types of color adjectives
Much like Japanese, Swahili/Kiswahili has two classes of adjectives: the closed class of inflecting adjectives, and the open class of non-inflecting adjectives.
In the closed/inflecting class, there ...
- 63.8k
6
votes
What is the difference between attributive adjective and predicative adjective?
"Predicative adjective" and "attributive adjective" are essentially syntactic terms, not semantic ones.
Attributive adjectives are ones that appear inside a noun phrase, modifying ...
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6
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Examples of languages that mark both nouns and adjectives for possessor
This seems to be very rare, but Tundra Nenets has been reported as an example, with optional marking of this kind.
(møny) | serako(-myi) | te-myi
1SG | white-1SG | reindeer-1SG
"my white ...
- 695
5
votes
Accepted
Why in most (all?) languages don't adjectives have gender independently of the nouns they modify?
The reason that where adjectives have gender it agrees with the gender of their noun is typically that the gendered adjectival form is made by merging the adjectival stem with a gendered demonstrative ...
- 2,363
5
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Stolen, part of speech
As Greg Lee indicates, participles are commonly considered to remain verbs, despite being used "like adjectives" in many cases.
However, the situation is a bit confusing because, as far as I know, ...
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5
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Adjective position in Provençal (Occitan)
I'll do you one better and answer both for Provençal and Lengadocian!
I know a group of Occitan speakers online and decided to ask them about it. The general explanation for this irregularity really ...
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5
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Pronominalized adjectives in Lithuanian
A native speaker here.
They are definitely not rare, one can treat them as commonplace. And not just adjectives, but also pronominalized participles and pronouns.
But they are also not as frequently ...
- 66
5
votes
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What does Potrefená mean in Czech?
Potrefená is a feminine gender past passive participle of the perfective verb potrefit “to hit”, its imperfective counterpart trefit has the same English translation, “to hit”. This verb is a ...
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5
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Did Proto-Indo-European put the adjective before or behind the noun?
Here are some reconstructed phrases in PIE. It seems, the adjective could go both before and after the noun.
Examples:
Adjective before
h₁ōḱéwes h₁éḱwoes "swift horses"
dus menes "bad ...
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5
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Did Proto-Indo-European put the adjective before or behind the noun?
PIE had a rich inflection system, as is echoed in the oldest attested daughter languages. Owing to this, if adjective and noun were each appropriately declined, the order could be either way.
As to ...
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5
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Is there a name for "noun-verbing" adjectives?
Since in your examples the 1st component determines the 2nd one (not just hunting, but specifically rabbit-hunting, not simply driving, but self-driving), such compounds are of the tatpuruṣa (aka ...
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5
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Why are these adjectives being presented as adverbs in syntax tree (Carnie, 3rd Edition)?
The distinction between "adjective" and "adverb" is not always clear in English, where many words can be used interchangeably as either. But the usual definition is that adjectives ...
- 63.8k
4
votes
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Do other languages than English have verbals ,too?
At least, other Indogermanic languages have the ability to derive nouns from verbs, too. In Latin, there is a suffix -tio, -tionis that forms abstract nouns (like derivatio "derivation" from derivare),...
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4
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Is there a term for an adjective or noun becoming a verb, like "to adult"?
The process of deriving a verb from an adjective would be called deadjectival verbalisation, which is in turn an instance of derivaton. The resulting word could be called a deadjectival verb.
Note ...
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4
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Term for -ed as an adjectival suffix?
I'm not sure if there's a name for this specific case that's more general than "denominal adjective" but it might be called a "possessive denominal adjective". There is work on this out there, e.g. ...
- 1,087
4
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Is gradable vs absolute a universal distinction?
I think there is a distinction here, and it's cross-linguistic—but your example falls on the wrong side.
Most English adjectives (that aren't already in comparative/superlative form—"*more best") are ...
- 2,625
4
votes
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The Grelling-Nelson Paradox
Just as you can view the question of the self-descriptiveness of "non-self-descriptive" as a form of the liar's paradox ("this statement is false") you can similarly view the question of whether "...
- 156
4
votes
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What are the pros and cons of having adjectives appear first?
Which approach allows for the transfer of a higher amount of information bits per second?
This is, as it turns out, a question that can be answered experimentally: neither. Coupé, Oh, Dediu, and ...
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4
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Why "a liter of water" but not "a 100ºC of water"?
I believe what you are seeing is the difference between Partitive and a normal DP.
Partitive indicates that the phrase is about a quantified subset of a bigger set of objects.
Some languages even have ...
- 8,599
4
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How come you can say "I am glad that ...", but you can't say "I am fine that ..."
This can be explained with subcategorization features.
It's pretty clear that words fall into a handful of broad categories that behave in pretty much the same way. For example, there are a lot of ...
- 63.8k
3
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What is the part of speech of 'modifiers to adjectives'?
In standard average European languages and also in classical Latin and Greek, there is no new part of speech for a modifier of an adjective or adverb, it is just an adverb.
I don't know whether there ...
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