Adjectives without Nouns
by David Gil http://wals.info/feature/61
by David Gil http://wals.info/feature/61
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:00 pm by wals and is filed under Nominal Syntax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 26th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
In Hungarian adjectives are never marked for case when the NP contains a nominal head but case marking is obligatory when there is no noun in the phrase:
Lát-tam egy piros rózsá-t.
See-1SGPast a red rose-ACC. I saw a red rose.
Lát-tam egy piros-at.
See-1SGPast a red-ACC. I saw a red one.
Even:
Lát-tam egy-et.
See-1SGPast a-ACC. I saw one.
So it is marked on the adjective whether the np contains a noun or not.
February 20th, 2018 at 5:00 pm
In Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, adjectives can be used without nouns, without any special marking, EXCEPT in the dative/locative/instrumental plural, where they get a slightly different case ending.
Reference: I’m a native speaker.
November 27th, 2018 at 10:15 am
I’m puzzled by the classification. In the languages I know:
Mandarin: ‘hóng de’ consists of adj plus particle ‘de’
Japanese: ‘akai no’ consists of adj plus particle/postposition ‘no’
Mongolian: ‘ulaan n” consists of adj plus particle ‘n”.
Other behaviour is different. For example, Japanese ‘akai no’ in the accusative (object of verb) is ‘akai no o’. Mongolian is ‘ulaaniig n” (case before particle). Chinese ‘hóng de’ can occur with ‘bǎ’ (’bǎ hóng de’), which is preposed but resembles an accusative. The classification here seems divorced from linguistic reality, presumably based on what constitutes ‘a word’. The fact that Mandarin ‘de’ (for instance) is classed as a ‘word’ by some shouldn’t result in such a disparate classification.