Adjectives are not verbs in Iu Mien

Authors

  • Low Saelee San José State University
  • Yining Nie San José State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5890

Keywords:

adjective, lexical categories, syntax, word order, tone sandhi, Iu Mien, Hmong-Mien

Abstract

In Iu Mien (Hmong-Mien; ISO: ium), adjective-like or property concept words such as 'long' and 'green' have been claimed to be lexicalized as verbs rather than adjectives (Court 1985, Arisawa 2016). We argue that Iu Mien indeed has adjectives as a distinct lexical category. We present evidence from word order, tone sandhi, and a class of exceptional adjectives, showing that adjectives differ in their syntactic and phonological behavior from verbal modifiers.

Downloads

Published

2025-04-09

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2025): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Low Saelee, Yining Nie

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Saelee, Low, and Yining Nie. 2025. “Adjectives Are Not Verbs in Iu Mien”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 10 (1): 5890. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5890.