ABSTRACT
The bulk of the following discussion is drawn from the unpublished Ph.D. thesis of M.K.M.Galadanci, University of London, 1969, entitled, The Simple Nominal Phrase in Hausa.
2.1. The simple NP
In the presentation that follows words are listed under descriptive headings such as noun, adjective, adverb, etc. But in Hausa words can often function in more than one such category. There has long been discussion as to whether a word such as bàbba should be called a noun, an adjective, or as Parsons would call it, an adjectival noun. The problem arises because the word can act as an adjective taking its gender and number from the noun that it modifies:
MOD H nā sàyi bàbbar ‘I bought a big gown’
or it can stand as the head of a nominal phrase and therefore its lexically specified gender and number, as with a noun, determine the gender and number of modifiers:
MOD H MOD nā sàyi wata bàbba kōrìyā ‘I bought a green big one’
In the first example the word bàbba is behaving as an adjective and in the second it is behaving as a noun.
