Do All Languages Have Adjectives?
Not really, read more to find out why
1. Introduction
German students are taught the concept of adjectives by the name “Wie-Wort” (literally: “how-word”) in elementary school. It seems therefore self-explanatory that adjectives express properties — “how is something?” or “what is something like?”. The answer to the question “How is the weather?” is answered by “The weather is nice”, where “nice” — as an adjective — characterises the weather’s properties. But is it really that simple? Can we be sure what adjectives are exactly?
If we move away from the European languages and look at the diverse languages of the world, this clear picture starts to crumble: In many languages of the world, the existence of “adjectives” as a part of speech cannot be proven easily, as this essay goes to show.
What does that mean for us? How do these languages express properties then? I am going to examine these questions by looking at several Oceanic languages, presented in a study by linguist Eva van Lier. Oceanic languages belong to the group of Austronesian languages and are spoken on the islands in the Pacific. This region is interesting from a linguistic point of view, since it inhabits a great diversity of languages despite having small populations.
In linguistics it is generally accepted that all languages distinguish nouns and verbs (Dixon et al., 2004). However, linguist Harrie Wetzer claims that the assumption that all languages must have a class of property words (meaning: adjectives) is strongly influenced by our European views and does not do justice to the world’s language diversity.
In this essay, I am going to argue that the variety of how languages talk about properties (how or what is something like) shows that adjectives do not exist in every language.
2. Distinguishing predicative and attributive property concepts
Eva van Lier, professor of linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, suggests that Oceanic languages only have so-called small “adjective-classes”, although she warns about using the label “adjective” hastily (Van Lier, 2017: 1238). I will use the term “property word”, which refers only to the “how” and “what” meaning of the word, without assuming that these words are necessarily adjectives. This name includes all concepts which express properties in any language.
Linguists distinguish between attributive and predicative property words: attributive property words are used as noun modifiers and can be omitted without altering the grammaticality of a sentence. Take the word “large” for example: In the sentence “A large tree is in the garden” “large” modifies the noun “tree”; it is therefore used attributively. Predicative property words, on the other hand, function as the predicate of a sentence and are thus the center of expression, as in the sentence: “The tree is large”.
In most languages, all property words can be used attributively as well as predicatively. These words correspond to the usage of “large” in the sentences above, respectively. In the following sections, I will describe some uses of predicative property words exemplarily and then go into detail about attributive uses.
3. Verbs or adjectives?- Predicative property concepts
3.1 Auxiliaries
Let us first look at predicative property words: In many languages, it is common that the auxiliary word (words that equal the English “to be”) is understood, even if is not spelled out. For example, this is the case in the Oceanic language Erromangan (Van Lier, 2017: 1251, 13b): kik armai translates to “You are good”, where kik corresponds to the English “you” and armai to the English “good”. Note that, although there is no word that is translated as “are”, nevertheless, the meaning is implied.
One can now ask whether languages that say “you good” like Erromangan have adjectives at all. The predicative elements, which are translated to English adjectives, could as well be verbs — There could exist a verb “to-be-good”, as there exists the verb “to sleep” in English. Then, the subject-verb-construction of “you sleep” would equal the structure of “you (are) good” (see also Stassen, 2013). This is illustrated in figure 2.
To distinguish parts of speech, linguists examine (amongst other things) whether the predicate changes its form depending on the subject it appears with. This is called agreement and, if present, hints to the verb status of the predicate. An English example of agreement is the added “-s” in the 3rd person singular: In the sentence “he bakes a cake” the “-s” after “bake” is mandatory. It only appears because of the subject “he”. It is therefore likely that “bake” is a verb.
While in English it is obvious that only verbs, not adjectives, can get the “-s” ending, in other languages this is not always the case. For example, in Nafsan, an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu, both property words with adjectival meanings and verbs have agreement endings (Thieberger, 2006).
For example, ga iwi “he is good” and ga ipan “he goes” (ga means “he”, i 3rd person singular past/present, wi “good”, and pan means “go”) both need the agreement word i, which is equivalent to the English “-s”. Thus, we can say that grammatically speaking, “good” in Nafsan behaves the same way as the verb “to go”. According to all the relevant linguistic criteria, “good” is a verb in Nafsan.
Nafsan is not the only language in which predicative adjectives and verbs cannot be easily distinguished. Many other studies report similar patterns in the world’s languages. This demonstrates that one cannot simply assume a one-to-one correspondence of part-of-speech categories across all languages and linguistic boundaries.
3.2 The possessive: “To have strength” or “to be strong”?
In some languages there is yet another way of realising predicative property concepts: possessive constructions. This means that words that express properties are literally “possessed” by the participant. The English sentence “she has strength” means the following. We say that a person (“she”) literally owns, or possesses, strength. On the other hand, there is the non-possessive construction “she is strong”, which is used more frequently in English than its possessive counterpart. In general, constructions of the latter scheme are preferred in European languages, but in many of the world’s languages possessive structures like “she has strength” are more common.
Although the clause “has strength” consists of an auxiliary and a noun, it expresses a property, which is fundamental for the definition of adjectives. Does the possessive construction thus become a property and should be categorised as an adjective?
It is easy to deny this in English, as a combination of a verb and a noun cannot form an adjective. However, as the authors Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Francez and Koontz-Garboden, 2017: 32) report, in some languages the use of possessive constructions to express adjectival functions is very frequent, for example in Hebrew and the language Hausa (Niger, Nigeria), where sentences with the structure of “he has cleverness” or “he is with cleverness” are preferred over sentences like “he is clever” (Abdoulaye, 2006: 1141).
4. Attributive: “the man with whiteness”
If a property word describes a noun (i.e., if it is used attributively) there are several possible word orders. In many languages, the property word comes after the noun (unlike English). French is a European example for this: Except for a few words, which are placed before the noun (e.g. grand/e, petit/e, jeune, joli/e, bon/ne), most property words must stand after the noun, as in the phrase une exercise difficulte — “a difficult task”. The very same structure is found in the Oceanic language Pohnpeian, as linguist Eva van Lier reports: ohl loakekeng, word-for-word translated “man intelligent” means “intelligent man” (S. 1246).
As with predicative property words, attributive functions can also be expressed by possession. We find this for example in the Oceanic language Lote, which is spoken in Papua New Guinea: Possession in attributive constructions is expressed by the attachment of a specific ending (a suffix) to the property word: non husu-nga-na translates to “the white man”: non means “man” and husu means “white”. The suffix nga stands for nominalisation: The word husu “white” becomes the noun husu-nga — “whiteness/paleness”. The second suffix na expresses possessivity, so that the literal translation of the whole clause is: “the man with whiteness/paleness” (Van Lier, 2017: 1247).
In Lote, the possessive construction husu-nga-na is still one word. Should we understand and categorise this word as an adjective or not? Answering this question suddenly does not seem easy. This demonstrates that we are strongly biased by our own language in the way that we perceive word categories.
4. Why does it matter?
Why should all this matter to us? What difference does it make if we do not categorise words of some Oceanic languages correctly? As the listed examples show, narrowing the part-of-speech category “adjective” across linguistic boundaries is not as easy as one would assume knowing the simple classification in English.
Properties are realised in several different ways in the languages of the world. Even though we only looked at a fraction of all existing languages, we discovered the strategies of using auxiliary verbs (as in English), omitting them (as in Erromangan), and possessive constructions (as in Lote and Hausa). At the same time, we must distinguish between predicative and attributive uses of property words. In figure 3, different possibilities for expressing property concepts are depicted.
This is only a small foretaste to the diversity that can be found in the property words of the world’s languages. The reasonable conclusion is that an exact definition of an adjective class cannot explain the various realisations.
Now, back to the question that you might be asking: why should this be relevant for us? Examples from different, possibly unfamiliar languages can encourage us to question what we think we know about language and our mother tongues: Since adjectives do not seem to form a universal category, how should we understand phrases like “he has strength”?
Furthermore, it shows that a classification that strictly follows the European model does not do justice to the diverse linguistic reality. The finding that there is no such thing as a universal adjective class might inspire us to challenge our beliefs regarding our maternal languages and question facts that seem self-evident and natural. I hope this article helped to encourage you to think outside the box and open your mind towards seemingly foreign — but quite fascinating — language phenomena.
About the author: Rose Hörsting
I am a student of linguistics at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf since 2019. As I am fascinated by the diversity of the world’s languages, my mission is to learn as many languages as possible.
Sources
Abdoulaye, M. L. (2006). Existential and possessive predication in Hausa. Linguistics, 44(6): 1121–1164. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Dixon, R. M., Aikhenvald, A., et al. (2004). Adjective classes: A cross-linguistic typology, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Francez, I. and Koontz-Garboden, A. (2017). Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stassen, L. (2013). Predicative adjectives. In Dryer, M. S. and Haspelmath, M., editors, The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
Thieberger, Nicholas. 2006. A grammar of South Efate: An Oceanic language of Vanuatu. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Van Lier, E. (2017). The typology of property words in Oceanic languages. Linguistics, 55(6): 1237–1280. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Wetzer, H. (2013). The typology of adjectival predication. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
