Nominal Modifiers
Adjectival modifiers agree with the nouns they modify in terms of the noun class determiner and the appropriate consonant mutation. This means that with diminutive and augmentative forms of nouns the noun class changes, and the adjective agreement follows on the basis of the new class. The following is a table sampling nouns across all noun classes and the ways in which they are modified, where the last two items on the list represent diminutive and augmentative noun classes.
The adjective agrees for number in the form of initial consonant alternation for some adjectives for which this is possible (e.g, it is not possible with mosu ‘beautiful’ but possible with farʄu ‘ugly’). Whether or not an adjective which has the ability to undergo this alternation actually does so seems to be dependend on the noun class of the noun it modifies, as the items in (4) show with the adjective xoƈu ‘thin’:
Above, each noun belongs to a different class, and in each case the adjective stem-initial consonant engages in a different alternation pattern: q-x, x-x, and nq-q. The initial consonant on the adjective, then, is first conditioned by the noun class of the noun it modifies, determining its singula form, and then undergoes an additional mutation from singular to plural forms.
From the table above, we see that the noun class can predict what kind CM an adjective will undergo. For instance, the adjective faax ‘good’ undergoes a noun class CM in okiin opaax oxe involving a similar despirantization (f-p) as occurs for the adjective xoƈu in otew oqoƈu we (x-q), and the nouns in both of these phrases are from the person class. In a change from singular to plural for this class, there is a reversal (p-f and q-x, for faak and xoƈu respectively). Similarly, in the l-x noun class, the adjective xoƈu undegoes no CM when ‘butterfly’ is modified, and farʄu and fuuxu ‘angry’ also undego no CM when modifying onan ‘rumor’ and obox ‘dog’, respectively. But they all become despirantized in the change from singular to plural: x-q, f-p and f-p, respectively.
From these examples, it is clear that adjective morphophonology is dependent upon noun class morphophonology.
Oana 21:59, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
