Abstract
This paper aims to describe the nature of the nominals (a cover term for nouns, pronouns, and quantifiers) and two word classes which modify nominals (namely, adjectival nouns and adnominals) in the Northern Okinawan Kin dialect. Each word class is identified by the criteria of its syntactic distribution and function. Contra the prevailing view in the Ryukyuan linguistics in which the adjectival nouns are labeled as “secondary adjectives,” I will argue that adjectives and adjectival nouns do not have any morphosyntactic features in common so that adjectival nouns should not be treated as a subclass of adjectives. Chapter 5 presents an overview of the system of demonstratives and interrogatives. Chapter 6 explores the nominal morphology. Topics there include: two kinds of plural markers (an affix, on the one hand, and a clitic, on the other), other affixes, nominalization, compounding, reduplication.
