The adjective class in Homeric Greek and in Proto-Indo-European

This paper addresses the debate regarding the status of the adjective class in Proto-Indo-European and its reconstruction. To address this issue, we adopted a functional- typological definition of the adjective as the most typical quality modifier in a corpus of text, gathered all quality modifiers in Iliad I and Odyssey I, and classified them into seven classes (simple adjectives, de-adverbial adjectives, denominative adjectives, deverbal adjectives, participles, compound adjectives, and prefixed adjectives). Finally, we evaluated the frequency of each class in terms of both type and token frequency. Our analysis shows that Homeric Greek is a non-typical language of the [N, A, V] type, in which verb-based adjectival constructions are more common than expected in standard languages “with adjectives” (e.g. Latin, English). The paper concludes with some reflections on the reconstruction of the PIE adjective class in the light of these data, suggesting that the classification of PIE as a language with “verb-like” adjectives deserves some attention.