Color terms and lexical classes in Krahn Wobe

Abstract

Many West African languages lack a separate category of adjectives; Krahn and Wore are also said to lack this lexical class. However, an examination of color terms in the Gborbo dialect of Liberian Krahn reveals a class of words which are neither nouns or verbs After describing the syntactic behavior of nouns and verbs and color nouns and verbs, it is shown that a third class of color words must be considered adjectives. The data supports proposals by Givon and Dixon that, universally, lexical categories are semantically based.