68 Anthony E. Backhouse
As indicated, several linguistic factors appear to influence membership both of
inflected and uninflected adjectives, and of no. and no adjectives within the latter
type. Their precise nature, and the interaction between them, requires further de-
tailed research.
4.2. SEMANTICS
4.2.1. Semantic relationsWe comment here on lexical semantic relations, as a preliminary to the consider-
ation of extralingual semantic types in §4.2.2.
Semantic relations of oppositeness, (near-) synonymy, and hyponymy hold
widely across inflected and uninflected types: while such relations are not in them-
selves decisive for word classification, their substantial presence may be regarded
as supportive. Several common examples are given in Backhouse (1984: 177) (cf.
also Nisio 1972: 169, 175). Uehara (1998: 182) takes issue with the items ii good,
okay'/dame (nalno) 'no good' given as opposites there, suggesting that the inflected
ii 'good'/warui 'bad' is a 'better' antonym pair, but lexical semantic relations are in
principle context-dependent (cf. Lyons 1963) and do not necessarily hold for the
language as a whole. In the present case, while ii and warui often function as anto-
nyms, warui has a more restricted range of use and there are many contexts where
this relation does not hold: as indicated, in addition to good', ii has a (mainly pre-
dicative) meaning 'okay', and in general its opposite here is dame 'no good'. These
occur very commonly, for example in the contrasting constructions illustrated by
Yatte mo ii 'It's okay if (you) do (it)' and Yatte wa dame da 'It's no good if (you) do
(it)' (where *Yatte wa warui does not occur) (cf. also Martin 1975:184).^13 The gen-
eral point is that the language in actual use makes ready use of adjectives of both
types in expressing these semantic relations.
As a more detailed individual example of semantic relations for a basic item of
general meaning, inflected ookii (adnominal alternant ooki (no)) 'big' has a native
inflected colloquial synonym dekai, and a large number of hyponyms, all unin-
flected, including: kyodai (nalno) 'enormous (in size)', bakudai (nalno) 'enormous
(amount, etc.)', oogara (no) 'big (of physique)', daikibo (no) 'large-scale (enter-
prise, etc.)', oogakari (nalno) 'large-scale (operation etc.)', daidaiteki (na) 'large-
scale (treatment, etc.)', oohaba (nalno) 'big (change, etc.)', saidai (no) 'largest'. These
hyponyms are all native or Sino, and clearly lexically complex (bound morphemes
oo-, -dai- both 'big').
4.2.2. Semantic typesExtralingual meaning is surveyed here in terms of the semantic types in Dixon
in Chapter i. The distribution of adjectives across these types is summarized in
(^13) Similar comments apply to Uehara's remarks concerning inflected umailmazui and uninflected
zyoozu (na)/heta (na) (both 'skilful/good (at)V'unskilfur) (1998: 182): actual usage often pairs umai
and heta (na), as illustrated for example in Zya, umai, heta wa kankei arimaseN ka 'Well doesn't it de-
pend on whether you are skilful or clumsy' (attested example from Martin 1975: 757).