Māori Grammar

English has various categories of words such as "noun" (chicken, book, house), "verb" (run, jump, sing) and "adjective" (big, round, yellow), as well as many others. The categories of words in Māori do not neatly align with those of English, and so there has been a greta deal of discussion amongst academics studying Māori grammar what those categories are.

One of the biggest disagreements is over what words like ora ("well") or pai ("good") actually are, and what they should be named and how they should be classified.

There are three monumental works of Māori grammar: those written by Biggs, Bauer and Harlow.

Bruce Biggs, who wrote the first major Māori grammar book, Let's Learn Māori, called them "statives". He treated them alopngside other statives like mahue ("left behind") and pakaru ("broken").

Winifred Bauer calls them "State intransitives" and treats them as a subclass of verbs.

Ray Harlow also calls them "adjectives".

Other authors have used other terms: David Kārena-Holmes calls them "Adjective-type verbs" or "A-type stative verbs". Lindsay Head calls them "adjectival statives". John Foster also calls them "adjectives".

On this site, and in its related lessons and videos, they are also called "adjectives", with the occasional acknowledgement that they are "actually statives"!