[New-Poetry] Adjectives, who needs 'em?

jforjames at aol.com jforjames at aol.com
Mon Feb 9 19:15:21 EST 2009


http://lughat.blogspot.com/2009/01/adjectives-who-needs-em.html

So clearly people can do without some adjectives, and clearly the behaviour of adjectives tends to be very similar to the behaviour of some other word class. Why not do without them altogether? It would be easy enough to construct a language where no morphological or syntactic tests could distinguish adjectives from verbs, or from nouns. So if practically every language does take the trouble to distinguish them, there must be some pretty powerful cognitive motivation for it - and some pretty powerful historical tendencies acting to separate adjectives from verbs and/or nouns. 

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