Re: Query: Verb followed by desu/deshou.

On 2007-10-16 16:42:40 +0900, Marc Adler <marc.adler@xxxxxxxxx> said:

The point
is, verbs are words that indicate actions, adjectives describe nouns,
adverbs (which I guess don't exist in your system, either) describe
actions, and so on. This holds true for Japanese as it does for any
language.

What you say is entirely sensible, yet even these definitions have flaws. In the sentence "nihongo-ga dekiru", exactly what action is being performed by the subject "nihongo"? And why exactly does "futoru" get to be a verb while "atsui" must be an adjective? They both describe agent-less states, and they both conjugate for tense and aspect.

And then there's the whole -nai problem. Do we really want to pretend that all negative verbs in Japanese are adjectives?

Maybe the word "verb" is just inadequate. We could say Japanese has a category of words that express action or state and conjugate for tense, mood, and aspect. They can act as predicates both in main clauses and in dependent clauses. Two basic conjugation paradigms exist, depending on whether the ending is -Cu or -i.

Likewise, Japanese has a class of nouns ("thing" words) which can be broadly divided in those which may take grammatical case, and those which may only serve as predicates. Nouns do not conjugate and instead take a copula.

Perhaps this is all foolish nonsense, but it makes more sense in my mind as I try to intuitively grasp the logic of Japanese. This is the language where intransitive verbs can be passive. Nothing is sacred!

(I haven't figured out adverbs yet, by the way. There's definitely some noun-like weirdness with those -ku adverb — oh dear!)


There is language, and there is grammar (as a description of
language). These two things sometimes do not coincide, and I applaud
your efforts to break free of IE-based grammatical concepts and find a
native system for Japanese, but I don't think simply reassigning
categories based on morphology rather than on semantic function is
going to get you very far.

Well, it gives me a better sense of what's going on. Before I started thinking this way, Japanese grammar seemed like a guessing game.

Anyway, over-analysis is a powerful mnemonic for me, even if I'm completely wrong.

Paul D.

.

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