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The two participles referred to in the title (one a perfective, the other aspectually unmarked) occur as complements of finite verbs, as if they were nominals. At the same time, they still betray their verbal origin by having nominal complements themselves. Also, they are used as modifiers within the Carib noun phrase, as if they were adjectives. Because these two nonfinite verbs thus share parts of their systems with nouns, with verbs, and with adjectives. [ prefer to call them by the traditional name of "participle" and to eschew the term "nominalization"--even though the latter is widely accepted (see Carlin 2004:351, Derbyshire 1985:38, Gildea 1998:123. and Meira 1999:565). This paper has a double purpose, One is purely descriptive. Cariban linguistics needs careful and detailed descriptions of the complex sentence in all of the family's languages, and I considered it my duty to do my part for Carib (Gildea [forthcoming:sec. 5]). Second, close attention to descriptive detail unavoidably forced me into a modicum of theoretical discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I study the way property concepts such as 'big', 'red', 'high', etc., are lexically treated in Otomi, an Otomanguean language from Central Mexico. I show in detail that such concepts are not encoded as adjectives but rather as verbs and nouns.Lexemes denoting such concepts also occur in an interesting type of nominal compound.The present analysis is based on the dialect of San Ildefonso Tultepec Otomi,but the claims made can be extended to other Otomi variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category membership of words expressing adjectival meanings (Descriptives) in Macro-Jê languages has been a topic of recent interest and dispute among researchers. While there is agreement about the absence of Adjective as a word class, there is disagreement on whether Descriptives should be analyzed as a subclass of Nouns or Verbs, since Descriptives share features with both. This study devises a set of internal criteria for establishing the category membership of Descriptives in Apinajé (Jé family). Morphosyntactic properties common to Nouns, Verbs, and Descriptives are explored first, showing that valid arguments can be made in favor of alternative analyses of Descriptives, or against a categorical distinction between Nouns and Verbs. Against this background, further syntactic constructions, such as relativization and imperatives, are introduced; these support a categorical distinction between Nouns and Verbs, and lead to the conclusion that Descriptives do constitute a subclass of Verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]