In Defence of the Zulu Adjective

Abstract

It has been claimed that the traditional Zulu ‘adjectives’ and ‘relative stems’ would be more appropriately called ‘qualificative noun[s]’ (Posthumus, 2000). Yet the synchronic syntactic behaviour of ‘adjectives’ is identical to that bf ‘relative stems’, but different from that of nouns, verbs, and prepositions. Therefore a distinctive term should be used for these two morphological word-types; an appropriate term is ‘adjective’. The argument that the relative-clause form of adjectives is derived from the predicative construction, and not vice versa, is further evidence in favour of the ‘adjective’ analysis, though this article suggests an alternative to Khumalo's derivation of the relative-clause form by ‘SP Deletion’.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 96 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.