98 CHAPTER 3. MORE GRAMMAR
(The stem for changes: its is , its is , and its
is - however, inflection uses the same rules)Then, the irregular verb :affirmative negative
present plain - +
polite + +
past plain + - +
polite + +And so, with these basic inflection tables finally complete, we can
move on to genuinely new inflections, to examine the rest of what can be
done with verbs and verbal adjectives in the Japanese language.
3.2 Further inflections.
3.2.1 Conjunctive
Conjunctives are words, or constructions, which join up two different phrases.
For instance, in the English sentence ”The birds are singing, the flowers are
blooming; spring had arrived properly”, the comma between ’the birds are
singing’ and ’the flowers are blooming’ acts as a conjunctive, as does the
semi-colon between ’the flowers are bloomng’ and ’spring had arrived’. In
Japanese, this particular kind of conjunction can be done in a remarkably
simple way: each sentence that is to be ”conjoined” with the next has its
final verb put in , and we’re done:
”(The) birds sing.””(The) flowers bloom.””Spring has arrived.”If we change the final verbs in the first two sentence fom to
, then we can join them up to form the translation for our original