2 Inflected and Uninflected Adjectives in Japanese 631975: 824). There are also a limited number of literary Sino items which combine
with an adnominal marker taru such as doodoo (taru) 'imposing'; in predicative
uses, they occur together with the verb sum.^9
- Multiple membership
Cases of overlapping membership are found between inflected and uninflected
adjectives, between na and no adjectives within the uninflected type, and between
uninflected adjectives and nouns. We review these in turn below.
3.1. INFLECTED AND UNINFLECTED ADJECTIVES
Two types of overlap, both restricted, are found between these types. In the first
place, three inflected adjectives, ookii 'big', tiisai 'small', and okasii 'funny, strange',
have alternative uninflected forms (marked by na, not no) in adnominal function
only: ookii ie/ooki na ie 'big house', etc. (Martin 1975: 747). These three items thus
occur as inflected adjectives or as adnominal-only uninflected adjectives. Ookii
and tiisai are clearly a basic DIMENSION pair. Both are phonologically unusual
among simple inflected adjectives in having stems containing long syllables; ookii
also has a stem ending in i (ooki-), a dispreferred vowel in this position as noted
in §4.1.1 below. Both also behave unusually in word-formation in not appearing in
compounds, their place being taken by the prefixes oo- and ko-, respectively (com-
pare nagai 'long' + ame 'rain > naga-ame 'prolonged rain' with oo-ame (ooki-ame)
'heavy rain, karui 'light' + isi 'stone' > karu-isi 'pumice' with ko-isi (tiisa-isi) 'small
stone, pebble'). Miyazima (1965: 99), based on a survey carried out by the Nation-
al Language Research Institute, indicates that for all three items the uninflected
adnominal forms occur more frequently.
Secondly, there are around a dozen items which belong fully to both inflect-
ed and uninflected types (cf. Martin 1975: 761): examples include komaka (na)/
komakai 'small, fine (of particles, etc.)', atataka (na)/atatakai 'warm', yawaraka
(na)/yawarakai 'soft', sikaku (na/no)/sikakui 'square'; massiro (na/no)/massiroi
'pure white', makkuro (na/no)/makkuroi 'jet black', maNmaru (na/no)/maNmarui
'perfectly round', hiyowa (na)/hiyowai 'weak, delicate'. (Note that some occur with
na, others with both na and no.) All are complex, at least diachronically. The first
three items contain the common native uninflected-adjective-forming elements
-ka and -raka, and were presumably attracted later into the inflected type (cf. Back-
house 1984:181; Uehara 1998: 236). Similarly, sikaku was the original Sino (bimor-
phemic) form. For these items, the inflected alternants appear to be much more
frequent (Miyazima 1965:99). The last four examples are prefixed derivations from
inflected adjectives.
(^9) What were referred to in Backhouse (1984:184) as 'sita adjectives' are here regarded as combina-
tions involving forms of the verb suru.