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7 Adjectivals<br />
(18) Inger<br />
Inger<br />
lä stuorap<br />
lä stuora-p<br />
Inger\nom.sg be\3sg.prs big-comp\sg<br />
‘Inger is bigger than a mountain.’<br />
várest<br />
váre-st<br />
mountain-elat.sg<br />
[pit110331b.144]e<br />
To indicate that a referent is the most extreme concerning the characteristic<br />
<strong>of</strong> comparison (at least within the group being compared), the relevant NP is the<br />
subject <strong>of</strong> a copular predicate which is complemented by the superlative predicative<br />
adjective. The quantifier gajk ‘all’ can be added for emphasis, 7 as in (19).<br />
(19) dát<br />
d-á-t<br />
lä<br />
lä<br />
vanj<br />
vanj<br />
dä<br />
dä<br />
gajk vuorasumos<br />
gajk vuorasu-mos<br />
be\3sg.prs probably then all old-superl\sg<br />
dem-prox-nom.sg<br />
dágaduvvum<br />
dága-duvvu-m<br />
make-pass-prf<br />
‘This was probably the absolute oldest made.’<br />
7.6 Restrictions on smáva and unna ‘small’<br />
[pit0906_Ahkajavvre_a.120]<br />
The paradigms for the two <strong>Pite</strong> <strong>Saami</strong> words for ‘small’ provided in Table 7.5<br />
on page 134 do not sufficiently indicate the restrictions placed on these specific<br />
adjectives. The root smáv-, a North Germanic loan word, only modifies plural<br />
nouns, while unn-, the native word (Sammallahti 1998: 265), usually only modifies<br />
singular nouns. No other <strong>Pite</strong> <strong>Saami</strong> adjectives underlie such a restriction;<br />
however, the Swedish adjective små (cognate with the source <strong>of</strong> smáv-) is also<br />
restricted to modifying plural nouns. 8 Therefore, it seems that this syntactic restriction<br />
was probably also borrowed. While a few examples exist in the corpus<br />
<strong>of</strong> unn- modifying a plural noun, smáv- is the preferred item and much more<br />
frequent in the corpus. 9 Examples are provided in (20) through (23).<br />
7 The construction gajk vuorasumos ‘absolute oldest’ in (19) is possibly a calque based on North<br />
Germanic; cf. Swedish allra äldst ‘absolute oldest’. In both cases, the adverbial modifier is<br />
based on the word for ‘all’ and precedes the superlative adjective.<br />
8 The Swedish adjective stem lite- is used for singular nouns.<br />
9 A corpus search (including elicitation sessions) resulted in 1 token <strong>of</strong> unn- and 10 tokens <strong>of</strong><br />
smáv- modifying a plural noun (carried out on 12 th November 2012).<br />
138
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