Adjectives are not verbs in Iu Mien

In Iu Mien (Hmong-Mien; ISO: ium), adjective-like or property concept words such as 'long' and 'green' have been claimed to be lexicalized as verbs rather than adjectives (Court 1985, Arisawa 2016). We argue that Iu Mien indeed has adjectives as a distinct lexical category. We present evidence from word order, tone sandhi, and a class of exceptional adjectives, showing that adjectives differ in their syntactic and phonological behavior from verbal modifiers.