Inflected and uninflected adjectives in Japanese

要旨

Abstract This chapter deals with adjectives in Japanese. Typologically, Japanese is a dependent-marking language; typical constituent order in the clause is predicate-final, and modifiers precede heads. Nouns function as the head of NPs commonly followed by case markers such as ga (NOM) and o (Ace), as modifier of nouns in NPs followed by the adnominal marker no, as complement of the copula da, and as complement of other copular verbs (such as naru ‘become’) followed by the marker ni. Verbs function as the head of intransitive and transitive predicates, and directly precede NPs in modifying structures. Unlike nouns, verbs and the copula da arc inflected, largely on an agglutinating pattern. Lexically, Japanese has dearly delineated strata. The Sino and foreign strata arc the result of borrowing from classical Chinese and (chiefly) European languages respectively; Sino words are, at least diachronically, typically bimorphemic. In addition, mimetic items form a distinct stratum within the native vocabulary.

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