2 Inflected and Uninflected Adjectives in Japanese 59(a) Copular complement of copula da (like nouns):
(19) Sisetu wa rippa da
facilities TOP impressive be:NONPAST
"The facilities are impressive'
(b) Copular complement, combined with conjunctive marker ni, of verbs such as
naru 'become'. This property is shared with nouns, but whereas nouns occur with
the marker to in some formal styles, to is much less common with uninflected ad-
jectives, and inadmissible with many.
(20) Doom mo rippa ni (?to) nat-ta
road also impressive be:coNj become-PAST
"The roads have also become impressive'
(c) Modifier of nouns in NPs, combined with the adnominal marker na or no.
Nouns as modifiers also combine with no, but not with na.
(21) rippa na setubi
impressive ADNOM facilities
'impressive facilities'
(22) tada no keizibaN
free ADNOM bulletin.board
'a free bulletin board'
(d) Some uninflected adjectives (cf. Martin 1975:180) function as adverbial phrases
in combination with conjunctive ni or, less commonly, with te-conjunctive de (in
the case of some no adjectives; cf. Wenck 1974: 98)." This is comparable to the con-
version of adverbs from inflected adjectives, and is not general with nouns.
(23) sigoto o rippa ni yaritoge-ru
work ACC impressive be:coNj accomplish-NONPAST
'carry out a task splendidly'(^8) Some uninflected words occur adnominally marked by no and as copula complements of da but
function adverbially without markers. The deverbal item hazimete 'for the first time' is an example:
(i) (a) hazimete neko o ka-u hito
for.the.first.time cat ACC keep-NONPAST person
'people keeping a cat for the first time'
(b) hazimete no hitoritabi
for.the.first.time ADNOM journey.alone
'first trip alone'
(c) Eiga e no eNsyutu wa koNkai ga hazimete da
film ALL ADNOM appearance TOP this.time NOM for.the.first.time be:NONPAST
'This is the first time to appear in a film'
These words are classified by Martin as 'predicable adverbs' (1975: 179, 783), in contradistinction to
'adjectival nouns' and 'precopular nouns' (our na and no uninflected adjectives, respectively), and we
follow him in excluding them directly from our treatment here. Most of these items do not occur as
copula complement of verbs such as naru 'become' (Martin 1975: 792).