2 Inflected and Uninflected Adjectives in Japanese 67(b) Lexical morphology: All native adjectives with the formative elements -kal
-yakal-mka combine with no. (with overlap with inflected adjectives for a small
number of items, as seen in §3.1). The large class of adjectives with the Sino suf-
fix -teki also combine overwhelmingly with na in modern texts (cf. Uehara 1998:
99, note 3). By contrast, native adjectives formed with the suffix -me (nagame (no)
'on the long side', etc.) combine with no, and Martin (1975: 823) notes a group of no
adjectives which are mostly derived from verbs or nouns: an example is maemuki
(no) 'forward-looking'.(c) Semantics: As mentioned in §3.2, Martin has suggested that some cases of
na/no overlap involve semantic factors (na being qualitative, no quantitative or
state-denoting). In support of this, note that mimetic adjectives (cf. Hamano 1998,
ch. 2), which are derived from bound mimetic bases, typically by reduplication,
commonly combine with no. Examples from Hamano (1998: 22-3) include berob-
ero (no) 'dead drunk', kusyakusya (no) 'wrinkled', gusyogusyo (no) 'drenched', gotig-
oti (no) 'hard', yoreyore (no) 'shabby', pempem (no) 'fluent'; many of these denote
states, and Hamano refers to 'stative conditions' (1998: 21) as a common seman-
tic characteristic of mimetic adjectives. Uehara (1998: 108-15) has also consid-
ered semantic distinctions between na and no items more generally, concluding
that gradability determines the occurrence of na over no. His comments include
the important observation that items which denote extreme points on scales, in-
cluding semantically superlative items, combine with no and not na: thus said-
ai (no) 'the biggest', saizyoo (no) 'the best', and saitei (no) 'the lowest'; saitei also
occurs with na, but in the (gradable) meaning 'terrible', as in Aitu tie saitei na
yatu ne 'He is a terrible guy, isn't he!' (Uehara 1998: 113-14). Several of the mi-
metic items above also appear to be semantically intensive and thus ungradable.
As a further example, the Sino negative prefixes hu- 'un-', bu- 'un, mu- 'lacking',
hi- 'non, mi- 'not yet' mainly attach to Sino bases and produce uninflected adjec-
tives (variously na, no, or na/no) (details in Martin 1975: 763-5, 826-7); deriva-
tives in mi-, in particular, commonly combine with no (e.g. mikaiketu (no) 'un-
solved', mikaNsei (no) 'incomplete'), and are semantically ungradable. While these
cases are suggestive, however, the correlation between non-gradability and oc-
currence with no is certainly not total: semantically intensive items such as mas-
siro 'pure white' and makkuro 'jet black' occur with na as well as with no, and ex-
amples such as kiwamete saisiN no tyuui o haratte (TV) 'paying extremely careful
attention, where saisiN (no) careful' co-occurs with a grader (kiwamete 'extreme-
ly'), are also readily attested. The native derivatives in -me mentioned above are
gradable but also combine with no, suggesting that lexical morphology may play
the stronger role here.
(d) Style: Finally, we have mentioned Martin's suggestion that occurrence with na
or no may in some cases be influenced by stylistic factors, with no being more
formal, especially with certain Sino items.