GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

                                                                                       Abstract

This paper provides a linguistic description of the adjective class and its functions in Nko?ro?o?, an Eastern I?jo? language. To achieve this, the Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire was employed as a data elicitation tool. The findings revealed that like many African languages in the Niger-Congo phylum, Nko?ro?o? operates a small closed class of adjectives that consists of three lexical items, namely áyá 'new', opu 'big/great', and pa?pa 'bare/empty/useless/vain'. These adjectives express the basic concepts of dimension, age, and value, and can be identified by the following features; they specify the attributes of nouns, they cannot be inflected to reflect temporal, aspectual, modal, or other grammatical meanings or categories, and they only function attributively and not predicatively. To function in the predicate position, Nko?ro?o? adjectives obligatorily need the presence of an ideophone, a noun or noun phrase. The adjective 'opu' agrees in number with plural nouns by taking a low tone plural clitic =a. In addition to adjectives, stative verbs may perform the function of adjectives. When adjectives and stative verbs that function as adjectives occur alongside other nominal modifiers such as pronouns, demonstratives, numerals, and the definite article in the noun phrase, they occur closest to the head noun as prenominal modifiers. With the aid of compounds, lexical morphemes, and suffixes, adjectives and stative verbs may be used to express the attributes of nouns in terms of equality, comparative, and superlative and to measure the quality a noun possesses in super abundance, large, or small measure.

Keywords? Adjective, Stative Verb, Nominal Modifier, Nko?ro?o?, I?jo?