The adjective class in Rg-Vedic Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European

After a brief introduction to the definition of the adjective class in PIE, this paper offers a corpus-based, quantitative analysis of the quality modifier construction in R̥g-Vedic Sanskrit (that is, the “adjective” in functional-typological terms). We gather every “adjective” construction from a representative sample of 51 RV hymns (a corpus comprising 708 types for 1208 tokens), then we analyze the internal structure of these constructions, classifying them according to 7 different classes: simple adjectives, adverbial adjectives, denominative adjectives, deverbal adjectives, participles, prefixed adjectives, and compound adjectives. From our analysis, it emerges that simple adjectives are rare in RV Sanskrit (comprising 10% of “adjective” constructions), while compounds, participles, and deverbal adjectives show relatively high frequencies (29.8%, 19.8%, and 13.5%, respectively). Some reflections on the reconstruction of the PIE adjective class in light of these data conclude the paper, showing that the classification of PIE as a language “without adjectives” or, more precisely, with “verb-like” adjectives, is more reasonable than usually thought.