The adjective class in Deni (Arawá)

Abstract

In the last three decades, adjectives have played an important role in the typology of parts-of-speech systems in terms of which meanings are cross-linguistically expressed by members of this class, and whether all languages in the world have an adjective class at all. In this paper, the focus is on the property-concept words in Deni, an Arawá language spoken by about 1,600 people who live in ten villages in Southern Amazonia, Amazonas State, Brazil. The analysis of property-concept lexical items in Deni has led me to assign them to a part-of-speech class which is distinct from those of verbs and nouns. The assignment has followed the Deni-specific criteria for recognizing the verb, noun, and adjective classes.keywords: Adjectives; Deni language; parts of speech.