The adjective is a beleaguered category in biblical Hebrew grammar. Many grammars of biblical Hebrew deny that the adjective is a category distinct from substantives. Joüon and Muraoka (2009:217) are representative of this viewpoint: ‘The noun in Hebrew and Semitic grammar includes not only the substantive but also the adjective, for in its formation and inflection the adjective does not differ from the substantive’. Similarly, Waltke and O’Connor (1990), following Richter (1978; 1979; 1980), see a grammatical category ‘nomen’ which is comprised of substantives, adjectives and numerals. This judgement concerning the lumping of the adjective with the noun relies upon the morphological shape of the adjective. As Gesenius’ (Gesenius, Kautzsch & Cowley 1910:§79a) grammar notes, ‘the adjective agrees in form entirely with the substantive’.

Andersen and Forbes (2012:31) agree that the adjective is a sub-category of the noun, but take a unique approach in two respects. Firstly, they restrict the definition by requiring ‘that any adjective modify an immediately preceding substantive’. Sentences such as (1) are excluded:

Secondly, Andersen and Forbes (2012:31) are more expansive than other scholars in including within the category of adjectives demonstrative pronouns and free pronouns, ‘if they are definite and if they modify an immediately preceding substantive’. Phrases in which the demonstrative pronoun modifies an immediately preceding noun would qualify it for adjective status, as illustrated in (2):

Within a variety of linguistic theories, the status of the adjective as a grammatical category is problematic. For example within the Government and Binding approach to generative grammar, Chomsky (1981:48) viewed grammatical categories as composed of two features: substantives [+ N], including nouns and adjectives, and predicates [+ V], including verbs and adjectives. The combination of these two features results in nouns [+ N, -V], verbs [-N, + V], adjectives [+ N, + V] and adpositions (i.e. prepositions and postpositions) [-N, -V]. Another generative approach to lexical categories is taken by Jackendoff (1977) in which the relevant features are [Subject] and [Object]. Nouns are then [+ Subject, -Object], verbs are [+ Subject, + Object], adjectives are [-Subject, -Object] and adpositions are [-Subject, + Object] (see the discussion in Baker 2003:11–12). In both approaches to categories, the adjective has a secondary status with respect to nouns and verbs. However, lexical categories and their features did not play a substantial role in these varieties of generative grammar.

Functional grammarians have described lexical categories on the basis of semantic and/or pragmatic distinctions (cf. Baker 2003:14–15). Some functionalists have described lexical categories on the basis of the kinds of items that they refer to, especially within discourse (e.g. Givón 1984; Hopper & Thompson 1984) – nouns denote things (long-term states of affairs) or ‘discourse-manipulable participants’, verbs denote events (dynamic, short-term states of affairs), adjectives denote states or properties (medium-length states of affairs). Other functionalists have described lexical categories on the basis of the prototypical functions of communication (e.g. Hengeveld 1992) – nouns refer, verbs predicate, adjectives modify. The cognitive linguistics perspective is related to the functional one in identifying prototypical semantic properties of the lexical categories. Croft (1991:65), for example, views the prototypical lexical classes as ‘objects’, ‘actions’ and ‘properties’ in the place of the traditional categories of nouns, verbs and adjectives, respectively. These categories have complexes of features, which he identifies as valency, stativity, persistence and gradability. Properties, for example have a valence of 1, describe states and those states are persistent and gradable. Objects, by contrast, have a valence of 0, describe states, and are persistent but not gradable. To take another example, Taylor (2003:343–344) discusses the ‘modification of nominals and noun phrases’ as involving four possible sorts on the basis of semantics: specification (of the type), instantiation (of the token from its type), quantification (of the token) and grounding (i.e. the location of the designated instance within the speech event). Functional and cognitive perspectives, like generative approaches, view adjectives as secondary to nouns and verbs. This is especially clear in the work of the functional grammarian Hengeveld (1992), who views categories as variable – a single lexical item in a particular language might therefore be both a noun and an adjective, both an adjective and an adverb, or both a verb and an adjective.

The difficulty in determining an appropriate basis for lexical categories and in assigning adjectives to a lexical category relates in significant ways to the structural variation that is exhibited among the languages of the world. Cross-linguistically adjectives exhibit extraordinary variety, in some languages showing similarities to nouns, in others to verbs and in still others to both nouns and verbs. As a result, within typological linguistics, the claim has been made that some languages have no adjective class at all (e.g. Dixon 1982:2). However, more recent linguistic research, from both the typological perspective (Dixon 2005) and the generative perspective (Baker 2003), has provided compelling evidence that the adjective is a universal word class among the world’s languages.

Furthermore, the debate concerning the status of the adjective is mirrored by the broader debate within contemporary linguistics concerning how the issue of grammatical categorisation ought to be approached (for an overview cf. Ansaldo, Don & Pfau 2008; Libert 2011; Miller-Naudé & Naudé forthcoming). In generative grammar categorisation is part of universal grammar and each item in the mental lexicon is identified as a member of a particular grammatical category (Chung 2012; Newmeyer 2007; Radford 2004). By contrast, in cognitive linguistics categorisation, namely the ability to judge that a particular thing is or is not an instance of a particular category, is an essential part of cognition (Bybee 2010; Croft 2005). Categories in cognitive linguistics are language specific and category membership is based on prototypicality rather than essential features (Taylor 2003:343). Linguistic typology provides another vantage point for considering categorisation, since typologists use either semantic relations or functions in their work of comparing linguistic structures across languages (Anward, Moravcsik & Stassen 1997; Haspelmath 2010; 2012).

In this article we re-examine the question of whether or not the adjective is a grammatical category distinct from the noun in biblical Hebrew. We largely omit from the discussion here the related question of the relationship between the adjective and intransitive stative verbs, except when it enhances our argument concerning the differentiation of the adjective from the noun (on stative verbs generally, cf. Cook 2008; Dobbs-Allsopp 2000).

We approach the question of the status of the adjective as a grammatical category by examining the syntax of adjectives and nouns in biblical Hebrew. We demonstrate that the morphological evidence, which has been widely used by Semitists to argue against a differentiation of nouns and adjectives as lexical categories, should be seen as superficial rather than determinative. We then use syntactic evidence to argue that the adjective and the noun are distinct lexical categories.

The linguistic theory utilised in this article is that of Baker (2003) who has provided a compelling theory of lexical categories within the Chomskyian generative tradition, utilising specifically the Principles and Parameters framework.¹ Baker argues that there are three lexical categories within languages, viz. verb, noun and adjective, and these three categories can be universally distinguished cross-linguistically on the basis of syntactic features. Lexical categories are thus part of universal grammar (i.e. the innate language facility of humans). It is important to note that the syntactic basis of lexical categories in Baker’s theory is primary, but the syntactic features project into the morphology and semantics of languages because of their inherent interrelatedness (2003:301–302). The approach of this study thus stands in stark contrast to current fashion within some quarters of biblical Hebrew which take a cognitive linguistic approach. In cognitive linguistics lexical categories are primarily semantic in nature. Categories are seen as prototypical semantic descriptions with fuzzy edges. There are two serious problems that can be mentioned here. Firstly, by using prototype semantics every example can be provided with a label no matter how marginal or diverse it is. There is therefore virtually no means of falsifying a cognitive linguistic analysis, thus rendering it empirically questionable. Secondly, in relying upon semantics cognitive linguistics requires Hebraists to determine first what a term in question means, which is intimately connected to its lexical category. As an example consider the term רַע, in the following verse:

Is the term רַע, an adjective or a noun? From a cognitive linguistic perspective it is impossible to decide except in terms of how the term should be translated. But this is also problematic. Does the term רַע, refer to ‘an evil [person or event]’ or does it refer to ‘evil’ (as an abstract concept)? The former translation implies an adjective; the latter translation implies a noun. The situation is further complicated for English speakers in that evil can be either a noun or an adjective, thus making judgements concerning the meaning of רַע more opaque. The decision, however, concerning the status of רַע has implications for lexicography–should there be two lemmas indicating homonyms (one an adjective, one a noun), or a single lemma with multiple senses? What is needed is an approach to lexical categorisation that does not depend upon semantics or discourse-pragmatics for its interpretation, but rather upon syntactic facts which are diagnostic of the underlying structure of the sentence within which the item is found. Baker’s approach to lexical categories provides the syntactic basis for discriminating categories and it has been empirically tested typologically against a broad spectrum of language families.

The structure of this article is as follows: In the following section, we revisit the morphological evidence concerning nouns and adjectives which has been used to claim that they are indistinct categories. Then we examine the syntactic evidence for distinct categories of noun and adjective in biblical Hebrew. In the final section we present our conclusions.

The morphological similarity of the Hebrew adjective to the noun in terms of inflectional suffixes has been taken by traditional Hebrew grammarians to be evidence for merging the noun and the adjective into one grammatical category. Specifically, the suffixes for the feminine singular, masculine plural and feminine plural are identical. However, as Gai (1995) has demonstrated, this apparent similarity masks deeper differences.

Firstly, nouns are inflected only for singular and plural; gender is specific and inherent to each lexical noun. A noun may thus be masculine or feminine as reflecting natural gender, or it may be grammatically masculine or feminine. The example in (4) is a typical grammatically feminine noun with feminine marking, modified by a feminine adjective:

In the case of feminine nouns whose plurals are formed with a masculine plural suffix, the agreement that the noun selects reflects its intrinsic gender. For example the feminine plural forms of the adjective and of the participial clause that modify the noun in (5) demonstrate that the noun is inherently feminine:

Furthermore, some nouns do not express grammatical gender by morphological means, as illustrated in (6) where the three nouns modified by adjectives all look masculine, but two of them (‘hand’ and ‘arm’) are actually feminine, as indicated by the feminine adjectives that modify them:

An adjective is inflected for gender as well as number; its inflectional form relates to agreement with the noun it modifies, not to inherent features within the adjective. In (7) the construct phrase ‘man of God’ is followed by a masculine singular adjective, which modifies the head noun ‘man’:

In (8), the construct phrase ‘crown of gold’ is modified by a feminine singular adjective, which agrees with the head noun ‘crown’:

The masculine plural noun in (9) and feminine plural noun in (10) are modified by the masculine plural and feminine plural adjectives, respectively:

Secondly, the four inflectional forms of the adjective were productive. This means that every adjective was capable of being inflected as masculine singular, masculine plural, feminine singular and feminine plural in the speech of the ancient Israelites, even though not every adjectival inflection is present in the Hebrew Bible:

In contrast to the adjective a noun can only be inflected for number. In this respect Hebrew grammars often misrepresent the evidence concerning the noun by indicating that the word סוּס ‘horse’, can be inflected in four ways that mirror adjectival inflection – as masculine singular (סוּס), feminine singular (סוּסָה), masculine plural (סוּסִים) and feminine plural (סוּסוֹת). In actuality there are two nouns, a masculine noun which refers to a male horse (סוּס) and a feminine noun which refers to a female horse (סוּסָה). Both nouns may be inflected for number.

Thirdly, although the old dual is fading away in biblical Hebrew, it is still present. But adjectives do not appear in the dual form. A dual noun is modified by a plural adjective:

On the morphological level, then, nouns and adjectives are distinct although they share some inflectional endings. Their most important difference morphologically relates to gender. For nouns, gender is grammatically inherent in the lexical item and may or may not be expressed by the usual inflectional endings. For adjectives, gender agreement is ‘purely grammatical, and is carried out by purely grammatical means for purely grammatical purposes’ (Gai 1995:2 cf. also Baker 2003:109).

The syntactic evidence for the adjective as a grammatical category apart from verbs has not been explored to the same extent as the morphological evidence. However, the syntactic features of Hebrew adjectives leave no doubt that they belong in a separate category from nouns.

This study has drawn upon linguistic theory and cross-linguistic typology to provide a new interpretation of the morphological data regarding adjectives in biblical Hebrew. It has also extended the analysis of adjectives by considering the ways in which the syntax of adjectives is superficially similar to that of nouns and the ways in which the syntax of adjectives is distinct from that of nouns.

The adjective in biblical Hebrew shares many superficial morphological features with nouns, especially with regard to inflectional suffixes and with regard to the fact that both adjectives and nouns can form the predicate of a verbless clause or an existential clause with היה. However, adjectives differ from nouns in morphologically and syntactically significant ways: they do not have inherent gender (their gender and number is a result only of agreement with the noun they modify); they do not have a dual inflectional form; only the adjective can function as a direct attributive of the noun; only the adjective can serve as the complement of מָה as a degree word; the adjective is not inherently referential (whereas the noun is referential); and an adjective cannot serve as the antecedent of an anaphoric pronoun or a reflexive pronoun (but nouns can).

Baker (2003) has identified syntactic features which universally differentiate three lexical classes – verbs, nouns and adjectives. Verbs are inherently predicates, nouns are inherently referential, and adjectives are neither inherently predicates nor inherently referential. In examining the biblical Hebrew data in light of these syntactic features we discovered that they assist us in differentiating nouns and adjectives, provided that phonologically null nouns are recognised. Furthermore these syntactic features help us to understand some of the distinctive features of biblical Hebrew adjectives in a coherent way. Firstly, the morphological characteristics that distinguish nouns and adjectives are directly related to the referentiality of the noun and the non-referentiality of the adjective. Because adjectives do not refer, they do not inherently have number or gender; instead these features are present only by virtue of agreement with a noun, and as Baker noted, one of the distinctive functions of adjectives is to serve as the direct attributive modifier of nouns. Secondly, we noted that both nouns and adjectives may function as the predicate of verbless sentences, but we described this as a superficial feature and not a feature that should be understood as advocating for a combined lexical category. The fact that both nouns and verbs can serve as verbless predicates relates to Baker’s observation that only verbs inherently predicate. Nouns and verbs thus share a syntactic construction by virtue of the fact that both are not verbs and not because they are of the same lexical category. Thirdly, the tendency for Hebraists to join adjectives with nouns under the rubric ‘substantives’, is a result of the fact that Hebrew exhibits phonologically null nouns. An adjective which attributively modifies a phonologically null noun seems to be ‘substantival’, when in fact it is not – such an adjective is simply attributive to the null noun.

We conclude that the noun and the adjective are distinct lexical categories in biblical Hebrew and they should not be subsumed under the category of ‘substantive’ or ‘nomen’. An examination of syntactic features provides principled means for differentiating the two within the biblical text.