An introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar & Language

54 CHAPTER 2. VERB GRAMMAR

did have these forms, instead missing a finalising and perfect form. This

gave rise to the following rather elaborative set of bases in :

Base form form form form

• stem + - stem +
  stem + stem + stem+ stem +
  stem + - stem+ -
  stem + stem + stem+ stem +
  stem + - stem + -


• stem + - stem +

This is a lot of inflectional potential, but as classical Japanese transi-

tioned to modern Japanese, all these forms have essentially become merged,

leading to a single inflectional scheme that mixes forms from the ’pure’ ver-

sions of adjectives with the -contracted versions of those adjectives,

leading to the question of which forms are to be considered belonging to

the adjective as it exists now, and which belong to the the verb , which

happens to work together with verbal adjectives a lot. In this book, we’ll

consider the final inflected for verbal adjectives to be a contraction

of the verbal adjective’s and the for the verb , which is

. This gives us ”verbal adjective stem + ” + ” ”→”verbal adjec-
tive stem + ”, where contracts to , giving us a final rule ”stem

• ”. So, in this book, verbal adjectives are considered not to have a
  genuine of their own, instead relying on the helper verb for
  one. However, other books list it as being simply ”stem + ”, and so for
  completeness it has been included in the earlier table of bases.
  Having covered the ”what they look like”, let’s look at what this
  means for a number of verbs from both classes, and verbal adjectives:

verbs