A New Analysis of the Morphological Structure of Japanese Verbal Adjectives — KU-adjectives

要旨

The present paper reanalyses the morphological structure of Japanese verbal adjectives (VAs) — also referred to as adjectives, canonical adjectives, or i-adjectives. Traditionally, inflected forms of this class, such as takaku from takai "to be high/tall", have been analysed as consisting of the so-called stem taka- and the so-called ending -ku. However, given the multiple morphological, syntactic and semantic parallels with verbal stems — such as tabe from taberu "to eat" — it seems more plausible that takaku as a whole functions as the stem of the verbal adjective. This paper thus analyses taka- as one of the two immediate constituents of the VA stem takaku, which encodes, as a VA radical, the lexical meaning specific to the verbal adjective, and -ku as the other constituent, functioning as the VA thematic suffix — namely, VA stem-forming suffix — that licences the VA radical as a syntactic constituent within the VA category at the sentential level (from the perspective of Distributed Morphology, this constituent may be regarded as an overt instantiation of the categorial head a): Stem: sentential Ending VA stem: lexical Light verb stem Inflexional suffix(es) VA radical VA thematic suffix taka- -i — -0 [−past] taka- -(k)i — -0 [−past] taka- -ku — — [0 past] taka- -k(u) +at- -ta [+past] taka- -ke — -reba "if (cond.)" The paper then examines how VAs encode the tense value [−past], proposing a new interpretation based on historical and morphological perspectives. Rather than the traditional view that -i, as in takai, expresses the non-past, it is argued that the phonologically zero inflexional suffix -0, as in [[[[taka]i] ]0], acquires the [−past] value through paradigmatic opposition to -ta, which is specified as [+past], as in [[[[taka]k(u)]at]ta]. By contrast, the atemporal form takaku lacks any temporal suffix as in [[[[taka]ku] ] ]. Based on this, the paper further explores the allomorphy of the VA thematic suffix -i ≈ -(k)i ≈ -ku ≈ -ke and investigates how the distribution of these allomorphs is determined by their syntactic environments. Finally, the paper examines the structural parallels between VAs and true verbs — particularly vowel-stem verbs — and the lack of surface-level structural parallelism between the negative forms of VAs and true verbs, as well as the reasons for this. How to cite: Makino, S. (2025). A New Analysis of the Morphological Structure of Japanese Verbal Adjectives. Preprint, LingBuzz/Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15764311.

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