Abstract

Toqabaqita has three classes of lexemes that function as modifiers of nouns. One class, the largest one, contains stative intransitive verbs. These lexemes (and similarly functioning lexemes in other Oceanic languages) are a counterexample to the typology of parts-of-speech systems of Hengeveld, Rijkhoff, and Siewierska (Journal of Linguistics 40:527-70, 2004), according to which verbs can only function as the heads of predicate phrases. The second class contains only two members, which are nouns. The third class contains only one member. This lexeme, which developed historically from a noun, can function only as a noun modifier and is the sole adjective in the language. In the development of the noun-modifying function of the lexemes in the second and the third classes, dependency reversal took place, whereby the original head position in a noun phrase became the modifier position, and vice versa.

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