The expression of adjectival meaning in Kannada
Sindhu Herur Subramanya
The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India.
The semantic notion of Property Concept (PC) (Dixon 1982) and the semantics of possession of these
‘properties’ (Koontz-Garboden and Francez 2010; 2013), both lend to a broad consensus in
understanding the expression of adjectival meaning in Dravidian1. Akin to other Dravidian languages,
Kannada also employs nouns to express adjectival meaning. However, in Kannada a small, closedclass of ‘true’ adjectives that are functional in nature were observed.
Tests of distribution and case marking on fifty PCs2 revealed interesting results. The PCs that could
not occur attributively and took case were given the classification of nouns, namely PC nouns. The
rest are a very small group of what I refer to as ‘adjectives’.
Amritavalli and Jayaseelan (2003) (henceforth A&J) have noted that there are very few ‘real’
adjectives in Dravidian, with adjectival meaning being expressed mostly by nouns. They noted a
relation between the paucity of adjectives in Dravidian to the dative experiencer or the dative subject
construction.
OLLeya, ‘good’ in Kannada is one of the members of this very small group of adjectives. The data to
classify it as an adjective is given below. 1(a) shows the attributive nature of this adjective and 1(b)
shows that the adjective cannot take case.
(1) a. oLLeya huDuga / oLLeya huDugi / oLLeya huDugaru / oLLeya huDugiyaru
good
boy
/ good
girl /
good
boys /
good
girls
‘good boy / good girl / good boys / good girls ’
b. *oLLeya-kke / *oLLeya-da / *oLLeya-alli / *oLLey-annu / * oLLey-u
good-DAT /
good-GEN / good-LOC / good-ACC
/ good-NOM
Juxtaposing this with a PC noun in Kannada koopa ‘anger’ below, we see that the opposite holds true.
(2) a. *koopa maatu-gaL-u
anger word-PL-NOM
‘*anger words’ (intended: ‘angry words’)
b. koopa-d-alli / koopa-kke / koopa-v-annu / koopa-d-a
anger-LOC / anger-DAT / anger-ACC / anger-GEN
Koopa however can occur attributively taking genitive case as in (3) below.
c. koopa-d-a
maatu(-gaL-u)
anger-GEN word(PL-NOM)
‘words of anger’ (lit. anger’s words)
1
Ref. Balusu (2014) for Telugu and Menon (2012;2013;2014) for Malayalam
2 The term PC refers to both nouns and adjectives in this study.
I adopt the idea of analysing the genitive case on PC nouns, such as on koopa (in 2c), as another
strategy to express Property Concept (PC) states attributively from Balusu (2014) who credits the idea
to Koontz-Garboden and Francez (2010).
The small group of ‘true’ adjectives in Kannada occur predicatively in constructions such as below
taking agreement for number and gender. The invariant value for person is 3rd person.
(3)
avanu/huDuga
oLLeya-avanu
/
avaLu/huDugi
oLLeya-avaLu.
he/boy
good-3.M.SG
/
she/girl
good-3.F.SG
‘He/The boy is a good person/boy.’
/
‘She/The girl is a good person/girl.’
The construction in (3) points to two obvious ways of analysing the predicate (oLLeya-avanu/
oLLeya-avaLu). Treating the phrase as an AP with agreement morphology and thus the entire
construction would be of the form NP AP, or as an NP yielding an NP NP construction. Drawing from
the work on adjectives by Cinque (2010), Baker (2008) who discuss Tamil and Kannada data and
generative work in Kannada (Amritavalli 2000; 2008, A & J 2003; Sridhar 1990) I will argue that
constructions such as above are of the form NP NP clauses with a copula drop.
The PC nouns on the other hand occur predicatively using two strategies. This is the motivation for
creating a sub-class in PC nouns, ones that occur in nominative-subject constructions from the ones
that cannot. The latter occur only in dative-subject constructions. The paradigm is given below
wherein (4) demonstrates a nominative subject construction in which the PC noun udda ‘tallness’ can
occur taking dative case. In 5(a-b) we observe that the PC noun koopa ‘anger’ can occur only in a
dative experiencer construction and not in a nominative-subject construction.
(4) John
udda-kke
John-NOM tallness-DAT
iddaane.
be-PRST-3.M.SG
‘John is tall.’
(5) a. * John
koopa-kke
iddaane.
/ b. John-i-ge
koopa ide.
John-NOM anger-DAT be-PRST-3.M.SG /
John-DAT
Intended: ‘John is angry.’
‘John is angry.’
/
anger
be- PRST-3.N.SG
To summarise, I put forward a three-way classification of PCs in Kannada. One, a small, closed- class
of ‘true’ adjectives, two, a group of PC nouns that occur only in dative experiencer constructions and
three, a group of PC nouns that can occur in nominative subject construction marked with dative case.
The semantics of possession expressed by a ‘floating’ dative case found either on the PC noun or an
experiencer pronoun makes for this interesting sub-classification.
Selected references
Amritavalli, Raghavachari and Jayaseelan, K.A. 2003. The genesis of syntactic categories and
parametric variation. Proceedings of the 4th GLOW in Asia, pp. 19- 41. Seoul: Hancook.
Baker, Mark C. 2008. The Syntax of Agreement and Concord. Cambridge University Press.
Balusu, Rahul. 2014. Comparison, predication and lexical semantics of PC nouns in Telugu-The
handout.
Cinque, G. 2010. The Syntax of Adjectives- A comparative study. The MIT Press.
Koontz-Garboden, Andrew, & Francez, Itamar. 2013. Semantic variation and the grammar of
Property Concepts.