An introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar & Language

2.1. INFLECTING 65

the contraction rule for verbs ending on. There is no real reason for
this, other than ”that’s just how people use it”. In all other respects,
is just another verb. Luckily, this is not some obscure verb you will
run into only occasionally and will have forgoĴen this exception for:
means ”go”, and is used so frequently you will not get a chance to forget
it has an irregular past tense.
These rules for contraction in verbs (luckily) do not just apply
to the past tense, but to several other inflections (namely the continuative
form, which is tremendously important to know, the representative
form, and theconditional form), so that this is not a set of rules you
will need to remember for a single inflection, but applies to a number of
often used inflections, making the exception itself somewhat ’regular’.

past tense

+ :

+ :

+ :

Irregular past tense

+ :

+ :

To form the plain past negative, rather than just the plain past, we

have to take the plain present negative based on , and turn this into a

past tense, which means we need to look at how to form the past tense for

verbal adjectives in general first.

For verbal adjectives, rather than a plain inflection, the adjectives

work together with the verb (meaning ”to be”, for inanimate objects

and concepts). However, because is a verb, it contracts: the clas-

sical past tense has become , and it is this that the verbal

adjective itself contracts with. Again for reasons mostly due to ”that’s just

what people ended up using”, the verbal adjective paired with

, [...] , has become contracted over the course of linguistic history

to become [...] in modern Japanese:

adjective meaning + past tense of actual past tense

high, expensive +

fun, enjoyable +

big +