Talk:Adjectival noun (Japanese)

Some observations
This is a good start. However, I feel there are some issues that can be addressed to make it better.


 * A reader must be able to read Japanese to make sense of the "inflection" charts.
 * The entire form is cited as an inflection. Examples are nice, but the primary inflection needs to be the focus. For example, for Nari-type it would be "-nara, -nari, -nari, -naru, -nare, -nare".
 * While there are not official English terms, 未然形, 連用形, 終止形, 連体形, 已然形, and 命令形 are often rendered as Irrealis, Adverbial, Conclusive, Attributive, Realis, and Imperative.
 * The note about めり is not necessary.
 * Should rewrite discussion of etymology.
 * The ラ変 verb あり can be referred to as "r-irregular" verb "ar-".

The Old_Japanese_language may be of reference. It is still very basic and undergoing changes though.

I can make the changes. However, I thought I'd first discuss it here. Bendono 06:03, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * There hasn't been any discussion yet, so I went ahead and reworked some of the sections. It may be benificial to include inflection charts for each major period as well. I may get around to that soon. Also, it would be nice to add a few examples next for clarity. Bendono 08:21, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

English
Does this happen in English? Such as a "linguistics institute" --Henrygb 02:11, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Why is only Japanese mentioned?
English has adjectival nouns: "We want to help the poor", for example. It also apparently happens in German - see this page. According to our own article on Slovenian nouns, that language has such a thing as well. Note also that Adjectival disambiguation page mentions that ANs happen "especially" in Japanese, not "only" in Japanese. Either this page needs those languages adding, or we need Adjectival noun (Japanese), Adjectival noun (English) and so on. Loganberry (Talk) 11:42, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Many such words are decidedly not nouns
The text includes a number of statements that 形容動詞 (adjectival nouns) are the same thing as 名詞 (nouns): Grammatically these words are nouns, otherwise behaving essentially identically grammatically, nouns and na-nominals are fundamentally grammatically the same. However, many 形容動詞 are decidedly not nouns in that they cannot be the agent or patient of a sentence (i.e. they can't be the subject or object): 静か, 特別, 華やか, among many others, all can be used attributively (as adjectives or adverbs), but none can be used as nouns, unless adding the nominalizing suffix &#8209;さ (a bit like English "&#8209;ness"). This is a pretty major difference between Japanese adjectival nouns and regular nouns. I'm adding a note to this effect. -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 15:54, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Substantial Additions
I had been doing a good amount of literature review of more recent and frequently-cited sources on this topic, and added the results of this review to the page. To my knowledge, everything I have added is factual and backed by the literature. Jhawk1229 | 12:48 17 April 2019 (PST)

Noun + の is not 'genitive case'
The claim 'regular nouns can function adjectivally by taking the particle 〜の -no, which is analyzed as the genitive case', is completely wrong, -no in this position has always been recognized as a form of the copula 'da' (as is -na). A phrase of the form N1 -no N2 is no more than a relative clause where N2 is the head, and -no the copula (verb) of the relative clause, i.e., 'N2 which is N1'. If N1 -no is derived from a so-called 'unagi sentence' (うなぎ文), then the analysis is more complicated but the syntax is the same. Rinbayashi (talk) 22:55, 26 October 2023 (UTC)