50 CHAPTER 2. VERB GRAMMAR
moods and aspects have been dealt with. For instance, the verb construc-
tion
means ”(I) had been made to wait”. While hard
to tell without spaces or a knowledge of verbal grammar at this point, this
is actually a series of six verbs chained together in a very specific way:
- Theimperfectbase form for , ”wait”. This base form
is used when forming the negative, passive, causative or ’pseudo-
future’ form of a verb.
+ – Thecontinuativebase for the helper verb for causatives,. This base form is a general purpose ’intermediate form’ for a
great number of inflections.
+ – The continuative base for the helper verb for conjunction,.+ – The continuative base for the verb , ”to be” for animate
objects. Combined with it forms the ”- ” form, which marks
a verb as present progressive.+ – The continuative base for the helper verb for politeness,
.+ – The terminal base for the helper verb for past tense,.We can see two things in thisdecomposition. First, the ’core’ verb is all the
way at the beginning, and the helper verbs follow each other in inflection
order: first the causative of ”wait” is formed, then that is made a present
progressive, this is then made polite, and then finally the whole construc-
tion is turned from present to past tense. Second, all the verbs are in some
”base” form; this is the crucial difference between Japanese verbal gram-
mar and most other languages.
There are five ”base forms” which are used in combination with
specific inflections, and knowing how to identify these base forms makes
verbal grammar significantly easier, because it lets us view complex verb
conjugationsin terms of a series of simple ”base form” + ”helper” rules.
For the past tense progressive causative for instance, we see a huge inflec-
tion that’s really composed of four fairly simple rules, applied one after
another: