Selkup Denominal Adjectives: A Generalized Paradigm Function Analysis

I examine some of the rich set of transpositional process in the Samoyedic language Selkup, focussing on denominal adjectives. Selkup provides evidence that (i) some case inflections add semantic content to the lexical representation in addition to realizing a morphosyntactic feature, (ii) transpositions can be defined over already inflected word forms (in this case, nouns inflected for case and possessor agreement). In each case the morphology provides forms of a lexeme, it doesn’t create a new lexeme. This is in contrast to genuine cases of denominal adjectival derivation in the language such as privative/proprietive adjectives. I provide an analysis of the transpositions in the framework of Generalized Paradigm Function Morphology.