AdjectivalNouns

Uehara (1998) observes that Japanese grammarians have disagreed as to the criteria that make some words inflectional and others not, which bears particular particular relevance to adjectival nouns. (It is not disputed that nouns like hon 'book' are non-inflectional and that verbs and i-adjectives are inflectional.) The claim that adjectival nouns are inflectional rests on the claim that the element da, regarded as a copula by proponents of non-inflectional adjectival nouns, is really a suffix—an inflection. That is, kireida ('it is pretty') is a one-word sentence, not a two-word sentence, kirei da. However, numerous constructions show that da is less bound to the roots of nouns and adjectival nouns than -i and -(r)u are to the roots of i-adjectives and verbs, respectively.

(1) Reduplication for emphasis

Hora! Hon, hon! ('See! It is a book!')

Hora! Kirei, kirei! ('See! It is pretty!')

Hora! Furu-i, furu-i! ('See! It is old!') (the adjectival inflection -i cannot be left off)

Hora! Ik-u, ik-u! ('See! It does go!') (the verbal inflection -u cannot be left off)

(2) Questions. In Japanese, questions are formed by adding the particle ka (or in colloquial speech, just by changing the intonation of the sentence).

Hon ka? ('Is it a book?')

Kirei ka? ('Is it pretty?')

Furu-i ka? ('Is it old?) (-i cannot be left off)

Ik-u ka? ('Does it go?') (-u cannot be left off)

(3) Several epistemic modality predicates, e.g., mitai ('seem like')

Hon mitai da ('It seems to be a book')

Kirei mitai da ('It seems to be pretty')

Furu-i mitai da ('It seems to be old') (-i cannot be left off)

Ik-u mitai da ('It seems to go') (-u cannot be left off)

On the basis of such constructions, Uehara finds that the copula da is not suffixal and that adjectival nouns pattern with nouns in being non-inflectional.

Similarly, Eleanor Jorden considers this class of words a kind of nominal, not adjective, and refers to them as na-nominals in her textbook Japanese: The Spoken Language.

Editor of the Japanese dictionary Kōjien (広辞苑国語辞典), Shinmura Izuru did not regard adjectival nouns as a legitimate class of words, and thus they are not described as such in the dictionary.

References

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