ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this study the adjective constructions in Tshiven~a are investigated within aset of criteria in order to characterize the adjectival category and todifferentiate it from other categories. An adjective can be defined as a wordwhich modifies a noun that prototypically denotes visible or tangible objects.Different linguists give different accounts which deal with criteria foradjectives where they give attention to prototype and certain multiple criteria.Dixon establishes seven different semantic types under which the adjectivescan be grouped, e.g. one of them is dimension.It has been established by Schachter that there are languages that have noadjectives at all, in which the meanings that they express are conveyed bynouns or verbs. In other words what is universal is not adjectives but tomodify, or elaborate on the meaning of a noun.Morphological adjectives are marked by a noun class prefix on the adjectivalstem. The prefix agrees in class with the noun to which it refers.Morphological adjective can appear attributively and predicatively.When adjectives are used attributively in Tshivenda they usually appear ascomplements of a noun. But when they are used predicatively, they occur incopulative constructions. Syntactic evidence relates to the fact that different categories of words havedifferent distributions. Adjective can not be identified by looking at it inisolation, because the form of a word does not necessarily indicate itssyntactic function.Descriptive possessives as semantic adjectives describe the noun they refer toin a way that is different to that of possessives. The descriptive part can beshown as the head of the noun and can also be shown as a complement ofpossessive [-a-] where they indicate location, time, event and gender.
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