2 Inflected and Uninflected Adjectives in Japanese 51700 inflected adjectives listed in medium-sized monolingual dictionaries, and indi-
cates that uninflected adjectives outnumber these by roughly 3:1 in lexical surveys.
These figures include lexically complex items, but large numbers of lexically simple
items are present in both cases. Simple inflected adjectives are closed to loans, but
these are present in complex items: for example, the native colloquial suffix -ppoi
'-ish, -y' derives adjectives from native, Sino, and foreign bases, including proper
names (cf. bahhappoi kyoku3 'a Bach-y tune'). Uninflected adjectives include sim
and complex items from all strata, including recent loans from English; the Sino
denominal suffix -teki '-ic' is notably productive.
Inflected adjectives in Japanese bear some resemblance to verbs insofar as they
are inflected and function as head of predicates and directly as modifiers in NPs.
Similarly, uninflected adjectives resemble nouns in that they are uninflected, func-
tion as copula complements in a similar way, and function as modifiers in NPs
with an adnominal marker. Our purpose in this chapter is to examine the linguis-
tic properties of these items more closely. In §2 we first consider the grammatical
features of inflected adjectives, in particular vis-a-vis verbs; we then take up unin-
flected adjectives, focusing on their differences from nouns. A complicating factor
in this area is the presence of multiple membership of various kinds; this issue is
reviewed in §3. In §4 we examine the wider linguistic properties of both adjective
types. Our overall conclusions in §5 are in line with those of Backhouse (1984),
namely that these items may in general be clearly distinguished from verbs and
nouns respectively, and that there are strong arguments for treating them as types
of adjective in Japanese. Compared with our earlier treatment, this chapter draws
upon a wider range of linguistic data, and takes into account more recent publica-
tions on this topic.
2. Grammatical properties of adjective types
2.1. INFLECTED ADJECTIVES
2.1.1. Inflection and grammatical derivationAs inflected items, these adjectives morphologically resemble verbs. Their mor-
phosyntactic properties are shown in the inflectional paradigm for the modern
language in Table i, with the verb paradigm given for comparison; forms are plain
(vs. formal).
While the inflectional categories largely overlap with those of verbs (and imper-
ative and hortative forms are also absent with non-volitional verbs), there are clear
formal differences: in particular, the basic nonpast -i and conjunctive -ku endings
are unique to inflected adjectives vs. (positive) verbs.^4 (Note that there is only one
(^3) Attested examples, sometimes with minor adaptation, are used throughout. Unless otherwise in-
dicated, the source for these is the Internet.
(^4) Functions of the conjunctive (-ku) form of inflected adjectives include (a) non-finite (cosubor-
dinate) predicate in formal styles (vs. te-conjunctive elsewhere); (b) copula complement with verbs