2 Inflected and Uninflected Adjectives in Japanese 57verbs on several more; negative verbs occupy an intermediate position, with nega-
tive stative verbs standing particularly close to inflected adjectives.^6
2.2. UNINFLECTED ADJECTIVES
2.2.1. Syntactic paradigmThese adjectives combine syntactically with the copula da and with adnominal
markers. The central phrasal forms for rippa (no) 'impressive, fine' and tada (no)
'free (of charge)'^7 in Table 6 are syntactic analogues of basic inflected forms given
for i adjectives in §2.1.1.
TABLE 6.(^6) As mentioned in §2.1.1, linguists such as Bloch (1946) have classified negative verbs as inflected
adjectives. While this view has not generally been adopted in Japan, the irregular negative counter-
part of aru 'be located, exist', namely nai, is routinely classified in traditional grammar and lexicog-
raphy as an independent inflected adjective, and on this basis it emerges from lexical surveys as one
of the most frequent adjectives in the language. In addition to its morphological irregularity, togeth-
er with the status of aru as a non-volitional, stative verb, a further likely influence in this classifica-
tion is the orthography: nai and aru are traditionally written with different characters, in the case of
nai with the character used for a negator in Chinese.
(^7) Like Uehara (1998:186), we follow Nisio et al. (1994) in indicating uninflected adjectives as com-
bining with the adnominal marker na or with both na and no. While they provide a useful guide in
this area, the indications in this dictionary are not without problems. In the first place, the inspec-
tion of texts inevitably yields counter-examples to the classifications given. Secondly, uninflected
TABLE 5.
Syntactic property Inflected adjectives Verbs
Head of predicate Yes Yes
Govern ACC NP No Transitives only
Copula complement of naru Yes Negatives only
Directly modify noun Yes Yes
Combine with AUX No Yes (except statives)
Combine with filler aru Yes Negatives only
Only nonpast with hoo ga ii Yes Negatives only
Occur withyooni No Yes
Modified by graders Most Some
rippa (na) tada (no)
Nonpast predicative (plain) rippa da tada da
Nonpast adnominal rippa na tada no
Past (plain) rippa datta tada datta
Conjunctive rippa ni tada ni
te-conjunctive rippa de tada de