Senu Yivokuchi

Grammar \ Adjectives

Verb- and noun-like adjectives

Adjectives are not a well-defined class of words in Senu Yivokuchi. They share the inflection paradigm of nouns, and are predicated in the same way. There are but a few exclusive derivations.

Senu Yivokuchi is rich in adjectives, because many concepts shown by verbs or adpositions in other languages employ adjectival roots, mainly due to the tendency to grammaticalize as verbs only the active/volitional meanings (like 'walk', 'hit', 'drink') and leave passive/nonvolitional concepts (such as 'loving', 'dreaming' or 'hearing') as adjectives.

There are some common behaviors that let us draw a line between adjectives and nouns:

• Adjectives tend not to be marked for definiteness when followed by a copula, while most nouns must be properly marked in all occasions;
• Syntactically, adjectives appear as modifiers (after nouns, or before nouns and bearing an emphasis mark);
• Adjectives appear in idiomatic comparative and superlative constructions, while nouns do not.

Comparative constructions

In principle, adjectives are inherently comparative in the positive sense. That is, the proper underlying meaning of an adjective is its comparative meaning; tal 'serious' actually means 'more serious', though in most cases the other term of the comparison is understood.

The comparative meaning appears explicitly when the speaker makes a comparison using the informal construction adjective + commitative-phrase.

    tal lidekhi   'more serious than death'
    guir ligit wo 'more useful than this gadget'
    ul lika sa    'abler than him [that man]'

Since this construction may lead to ambiguity (the commitative case being heavily overloaded), many people use the auxilliary word tugia 'compared'.

    tal tugia lidekhi   'serious compared to death'
    guir tugia ligit wo 'useful compared to this gadget'
    ul tugia lika sa    'able compared to him'

Superlative constructions

The most common superlative construction uses the word esi 'the one, number one' (similar to the usage of Japanese ichiban) and the genitive form of the adjective.

    esi yiteli   'number one of the serious' = 'the most serious'
    esi yighuiri 'number one of the useful' = 'the most useful'

An alternative construction extends the meaning of the comparative using deri 'everyone' or dro 'everything' as the second term.

    tal lidro   'more serious than everything'
    ul lideri   'abler than everyone'

(Since deri is also the definite form of the demonstrative der 'all', many people use it in all instances to refer indistinctly to people or things, instead of dro, understanding that deri may mean 'all of the things mentioned before'.)