Re-discovering the Quechua adjective

Floyd, Simeon

doi:10.1515/LITY.2011.003

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Re-discovering the Quechua adjective

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Floyd, Simeon
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Language documentation and data mining;
Categories across Language and Cognition, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Floyd, S. (2011). Re-discovering the Quechua adjective. Linguistic Typology, 15, 25-63. doi:10.1515/LITY.2011.003.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0012-CFCD-0

Abstract

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. It is concluded that by virtually any standard Quechua shows clear evidence for a distinct class of attributive noun modifiers, and that in the future Quechua should not be considered a “flexible” noun/adjective language for the purposes of crosslinguistic comparison.