Glossary 363
Progressive Some action that is taking place, or ”progressing”, in the world,
leading up to some resultant state. For instance, ”the window is
opening” is a progressive action, which will result in the window
being in an opened state..
Prohibiting Forbidding something. Contrast to ”imperative” and ”com-
manding”..
Pronoun A word that takes the place of a noun in a sentence and refers to
this replaced noun instead..
Pronunciation The way language sounds when spoken..
Pseudo-future A verb form that is not a true future form, but has certain
aspects of it. In Japanese, the pseudo-future does not indicate a future
tense, but is only used when some verb may turn out to describe a
state in the world or an action taking place in it at a later time, such
as a cohortative, dubitative or presumptive..
Punctuation Symbols added to wriĴen text to separation, such as full stops,
commas, quoting symbols, etc..
Quantification Expressing something as a quantity, either in numerical
values or conceptual quantities such as ”a liĴle” or ”a lot”..
Radical A kanji that can be used to index and look up other kanji with.
There are 214 of these radicals, called the ”classical radicals”, but
many of these have one or more variations when used as grapheme
in larger kanji, leading to roughly 400 graphemes being used as rad-
ical..
Reserved speech A form of speech where one exercises self-restraint, try-
ing to keep one’s thoughts and ideas to oneself, by stating maĴers as
impersonal possibility or fact..
Resultant stateA state describing (part of) the world, that comes from a
certain action having been performed. For instance, the act of open-
ing the window leads to the resultant state of an open window..
Stem The part of a word that does not change when it is inflected..
Subject The principal actor or performer in a verb phrase. Compare to
”direct object” and ”indirect object”..