3.1. REVISITS AND SIMPLE INFLECTIONS 91
, ’early’), is turning into the adverb ’quickly’ by using its.
With noun adjectives, we use instead of to effect an adverbial
construction:
”divide (up).””divide cleanly/neatly”
You might recognise this from the section on verb particles from
the previous chapter. When used with quality or aspect nouns (and noun
adjectives in general), using leads to the noun being interpreted as be-
ing used adverbially. However, when the noun is a true noun, does
something very different. To illustrate this, two sentences:
The first sentence has a noun that describes an aspect, , meaning
’completely’. Thus, because it is paired with , this noun is being used as
an adverb to , ’lose’. This sentence translates to ”Losing completely”.
On the other hand, does not describe a quality or aspect, it just means
’friend(s)’. As such, when it is paired with it becomes a verb detail:
”(I/you/he/she/we/they) lost to (my/your/his/her/our/their) friend(s).”
So be careful. If the noun you’re using is not a noun ’adjective’,
you can quite easily say something completely different from what you
intended to say.
3.1.4 Noun forms
Not just nouns can act as nouns, verbs and verbal adjectives, too, can be in-
flected so that they act like nouns. Much like we can either ”walk” through
a neighbourhood, or take ”a walk” through a neighbourhood in English,
so too in Japanese can verbs be used as nouns, provided we use their
:
”It’s my loss.”
Here, the noun ”loss” comes from the verb , ”to lose”.
By using its , it can be used as a noun in a sentence. Both and
verbs follow this rule.