Property concepts in Tabaq: More than one road can lead to Rome
Domain:
natural language processingRecord type:
paper
Creator:
GerBir
Publisher:
Wal
Host:
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the interplay between the morphosyntactic class of adjectives, the semantics of property concepts, and the function of noun modification in Tabaq, a Kordofan Nubian language (Nilo-Saharan phylum) spoken in the north-west of the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. Tabaq has a small class of adjectives containing few semantic types, and playing only a limited role with respect to the core function of adjectives: the modification of nouns. By contrast, a large number of descriptive modifiers is derived from two other word classes, verbs and nouns, and this paper describes the different ways of coding property concepts in Tabaq.