Chapter 99Property Predicates
Direct predication and person marking, state and change readings, manner and auxiliary uses, ambient conditions, and the adjective debate.
99.1 Property words as predicates
Words such as pon ‘be small’, pewre ‘be young’ and pirka ‘be good, be well’ can head predicates directly. They take the subject markers of intransitive verbs. Nakagawa compares ku=pewre ‘I am young’ with ku=mina ‘I laugh’: their person morphology belongs to the same paradigm Nakagawa (2024: 119).
‘I am a poor woman.’
Nakagawa 2022: §2.1; Author's illustration
Wen modifies menoko. The noun phrase ‘poor woman’ is the complement of ne, whose person form indexes the speaker.
The second example contains a noun phrase as the copular complement. A property predicate can also modify a noun directly, with the same form that it has as a predicate. These two uses are central to the prevailing classification of such words as verbs Nakagawa (2022: §§2.1–2.2).
99.2 Being in a state and entering it
A single property verb can describe a state or a change into that state. Poro can mean ‘be big, be older’ or ‘grow big, grow older’; pirka can express good health or recovery. Context supplies the appropriate reading Nakagawa (2022: §2.3).
Adding ne is not the way to obtain this reading. Nakagawa explicitly rejects *poro ne for ‘become big’ in the Handbook discussion Nakagawa (2022: §2.3) and *hure ne for ‘become red’ in the later grammar Nakagawa (2024: 119). The property verb itself supplies the predicate. Copular ne has its own state and change readings with nominal complements; see Chapter 96 (Copular ne and Nominal Predication).
99.3 Manner expressions and auxiliary uses
The ending -no forms many manner expressions from property verbs, including pirka-no ‘well’. Some verbs also have a bare adverbial use: Nakagawa records tunas ‘quick’ directly before a verb, alongside tunasno ‘quickly’. He describes this bare use as lexically limited Nakagawa (2024: 121).
A few property verbs can follow another verb as auxiliaries. In the Chitose example ek moyre ruwe an na, moyre ‘slow’ describes delay in coming Nakagawa (2024: 121–122, example 5). These patterns concern particular lexical items and constructions. Compound uses, where a property stem precedes another stem without no, are discussed in Chapter 91 (Manner Compounds and Adverbial Incorporation).
99.4 Ambient conditions and personal sensations
A similar English adjective can translate predicates with different argument structures. Nakagawa distinguishes Saru zero-place mean ‘be cold’ of the weather from one-place merayke ‘feel cold’. In his example, a cold autumn coexists with the narrator's feeling no cold Nakagawa (2024: 130, table 12 and example 15). The experiencer is the grammatical subject of merayke and receives intransitive subject marking. An ambient predicate has no corresponding personal subject.
99.5 The adjective analysis
Nakagawa argues that the shared syntax and person morphology justify treating property predicates as intransitive verbs. He also considers differences in the manner-linking uses of no, and attributes them chiefly to the meaning of the predicate phrase. His discussion explicitly disagrees with Dixon's proposal that a separate adjective class should be recognized in every language Nakagawa (2022: §2.4). The observed property meanings remain useful semantic distinctions within the verbal analysis. The broader classification debate is covered in Chapter 37 (Property Predicates and the Adjective Analysis).