32 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
two categories, namely the ”five grade” verbs called godan,
, and the
”single grade” verbs, called ichidan,
. These two categories inflect
(take on differenttense,mood, etc) in the same way on almost all possible
inflections, but of course differ on some (otherwise there wouldn’t be two
categories, but just one).
With respect to transitivity, Japanese verbs can be a liĴle problem-
atic. Rather than being labelled intransitive or transitive, Japanese verbs
are labelled as being
or
, literally ”works-on-its-own-verb”
and ”works-paired-with-something-verb”. Quite often these two map to
intransitive and transitive, respectively, but sometimes they don’t. For in-
stance, traversal verbs (such as ’walk’, ’run’, ’fly’, ’sail’, etc.) are intransitive
in English, but are in Japanese: they can be used with an object to
indicate what is being walked or run over, what is being flown through,
what’s being sailed in, etc. As such, while in English one cannot ”walk the
street”, in Japanese this is exactly what you’re doing.
on the other hand do not have a ”verb object”; they operate
on their own. For instance, in English we can say ”I understand the text”,
and if we look at the sentence from a grammatical point of view we can say
that ’the text’ may be considered the verb object for the verb ’understand’.
However, in Japan the verb for understanding,
, is a verb,
and so even though you’re used to thinking of ”understanding” as a tran-
sitive verb action, you suddenly have to get used to it being an intransitive
verb action in Japanese. Particularly at first, this can be somewhat con-
fusing, but like all foreign languages, exposure to frequently used verbs
means you’ll quickly develop a sense of how to use them properly (even if
you can’t remember the terms ’intransitive’, ’transitive’, and
!).
1.4.3 Nouns
Nounsare words that are used to name ”something”s, although those
somethings don’t need to be things you can actually hold in your hand
and look at: ”car”, ”New York”, ”magnification” and ”ambiguity” are all
nouns, but while you can touch a car, or point at New York, it’s impossible
to point at something and go ”that is magnification” or ”that is ambiguity”.