Adjectives
Adjectives may be said to be morphosyntactic and functional “hybrids” in most, if not in all, Khoe languages: they are used in essentially the same way as verbs of state and as nominal attributes and, depending on the theoretical viewpoint adopted, they may be described alternatively as verbs which can also be used to modify nouns or as nominal modifiers which also serve as verbs of state. The present treatment of adjectives also covers numerals. Most Khoisan languages are poor in numerals, some languages have no more than two or three traditional numerals. Numerals behave in many ways like adjectives; as we will see, however, there are also differences.
In Hiechware, adjectives are invariable forms, that is, they have no pgn’s on them. As attributes they precede their head noun, as illustrated in (1).
(1)
Dornan’s data suggest that Hiechware numerals may either precede or follow their head noun; examples are found in (2a) and (2b), respectively. In either case, no pgn marking has been found (note that the meaning of tenses provided by Dornan is peculiar in many cases).
(2)
As in Hiechware, adjectives also precede the noun in Kxoe without any pgn marking. Köhler (1973:38) observes that the nominalized adjective can be placed after the noun it modifies, in which case it expresses “emphasis” and may be pgn marked. Such cases must be rare; an analysis of Kxoe texts suggests that pre nominal adjectives without pgn suffixes are the rule, as in (3) below.
(3)
There is an alternative pattern in Kxoe involving post-nominal adjectives followed by the possessive marker dì, which serves mainly to express contrastive ‘emphasis’ (Köhler 1973:34). This pattern is associated with the use of the ‘indefinite form’ ’à, but there is no pgn marking either.
The little information available on numerals in Kxoe suggests that pgn’s are not normally used on numeral attributes, if at all. Examples are found in (4). (Note that there are two different terms for ‘three’; the first [in 4a] being used in traditional contexts and the second [in 10b] in contexts relating to modern western-type life.)
(4)
Bleek (1928:56) says that adjectives in Naro ‘[…] are sometimes used without endings, sometimes declined as the noun’. On the basis of the texts provided by her, however, adjectives used as attributes are not normally pgn marked, e.g.
(5)
Numeral attributes without pgn’s are fairly common in Naro; more often than not, however, numerals have a pgn on them. Example (6) might suggest that pgn use is more likely with human nouns (as in 6a) than with inanimate nouns (6b); the evidence is, however, not entirely conclusive.
To summarize, pgn marking appears to be uncommon on attributival adjectives in all three languages. In Naro, however, numeral attributes have pgn’s in some of their uses though not in others.
