Japanese grammar
is a synthetic language with a regular agglutinative subject-object-verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. In language typology, it has many features divergent from most European languages. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. There are many such languages, but few among European languages. It is a topic-prominent language.
Some distinctive aspects of modern Japanese sentence structure
Word order: head final and left branching
The modern theory of constituent order, usually attributed to Joseph Greenberg, identifies several kinds of phrases. Each one has a head and possibly a modifier. The head of a phrase either precedes its modifier or follows it. Some of these phrase types, with the head marked in boldface, are:- genitive phrase, i.e., noun modified by another noun ;
- noun governed by an adposition ;
- comparison.
- noun modified by an adjective.
- genitive phrase: "猫の色", cat GEN color = "the cat's color ";
- noun governed by an adposition:日本に, Japan in = "in Japan";
- comparison: "Yより大きい", Y than big = "bigger than Y";
- noun modified by an adjective: "黒い猫" = "black cat".
Head finality prevails also when sentences are coordinated instead of subordinated. In the world's languages, it is common to avoid repetition between coordinated clauses by optionally deleting a constituent common to the two parts, as in Bob bought his mother some flowers and his father a tie, where the second bought is omitted. In Japanese, such "gapping" must precede in the reverse order: Bob mother for some flowers and father for tie bought. The reason for this is that in Japanese, sentences always end in a verb —the only exceptions being a few sentence-ending particles such as ka, ne, and yo. The particle ka turns a statement into a question, while the others express the speaker's attitude towards the statement.
Word class system
Japanese has five major lexical word classes:- nouns
- verbal nouns
- nominal adjectives
- verbs
- adjectives
Some scholars, such as Eleanor Harz Jorden, refer to adjectives instead as adjectivals, since they are grammatically distinct from adjectives: they can predicate a sentence. That is, is glossed as "hot" when modifying a noun phrase, as in, but as "is hot" when predicating, as in.
The two inflected classes, verb and adjective, are closed classes, meaning they do not readily gain new members. Instead, new and borrowed verbs and adjectives are conjugated periphrastically as verbal noun + suru and adjectival noun + na. This differs from Indo-European languages, where verbs and adjectives are open classes, though analogous "do" constructions exist, including English "do a favor", "do the twist" or French "faire un footing", and periphrastic constructions are common for other senses, like "try climbing" or "try parkour". Other languages where verbs are a closed class include Basque: new Basque verbs are only formed periphrastically. Conversely, pronouns are closed classes in Western languages but open classes in Japanese and some other East Asian languages.
In a few cases new verbs are created by appending to a noun or using it to replace the end of a word. This is most often done with borrowed words, and results in a word written in a mixture of katakana and hiragana, which is otherwise very rare. This is typically casual, with the most well-established example being , from, with other common examples including, from, and from. In cases where the borrowed word already ends with a, this may be punned to a, as in, from, and, from.
New adjectives are extremely rare; one example is, from adjectival noun, and a more casual recent example is, by contraction of. By contrast, in Old Japanese adjectives were open, as reflected in words like, from the adjective, and, from the noun . Japanese adjectives are unusual in being closed class but quite numerous – about 700 adjectives – while most languages with closed class adjectives have very few. Some believe this is due to a grammatical change of inflection from an aspect system to a tense system, with adjectives predating the change.
The conjugation of i-adjectives has similarities to the conjugation of verbs, unlike Western languages where inflection of adjectives, where it exists, is more likely to have similarities to the declension of nouns. Verbs and adjectives being closely related is unusual from the perspective of English, but is a common case across languages generally, and one may consider Japanese adjectives as a kind of stative verb.
Japanese vocabulary has a large layer of Chinese loanwords, nearly all of which go back more than one thousand years, yet virtually none of them are verbs or "i-adjectives" – they are all nouns, of which some are verbal nouns and some are adjectival nouns. In addition to the basic verbal noun + suru form, verbal nouns with a single-character root often experienced sound changes, such as → →, as in, and some cases where the stem underwent sound change, as in, from.
Verbal nouns are uncontroversially nouns, having only minor syntactic differences to distinguish them from pure nouns like 'mountain'. There are some minor distinctions within verbal nouns, most notably that some primarily conjugate as , more like nouns, while others primarily conjugate as, and others are common either way. For example, is much more common than, while is much more common than. Nominal adjectives have more syntactic differences versus pure nouns, and traditionally were considered more separate, but they, too, are ultimately a subcategory of nouns.
There are a few minor word classes that are related to adjectival nouns, namely the taru adjectives and naru adjectives. Of these, naru adjectives are fossils of earlier forms of na adjectives, and are typically classed separately, while taru adjectives are a parallel class, but are typically classed with na adjectives.
Japanese as a topic-prominent language
In discourse pragmatics, the term topic refers to what a section of discourse is about. At the beginning of a section of discourse, the topic is usually unknown, in which case it is usually necessary to explicitly mention it. As the discourse carries on, the topic need not be the grammatical subject of each new sentence.Starting with Middle Japanese, the grammar evolved so as to explicitly distinguish topics from nontopics. This is done by two distinct particles. Consider the following pair of sentences:
Both sentences translate as "the sun rises". In the first sentence the sun is not a discourse topic—not yet; in the second sentence it now is a discourse topic. In linguistics a sentence such as the second one is termed a presentational sentence because its function in the discourse is to present sun as a topic, to "broach it for discussion". Once a referent has been established as the topic of the current monolog or dialog, then in modern Japanese its marking will change from ga to wa. To better explain the difference, the translation of the second sentence can be enlarged to "As for the sun, it rises" or "Speaking of the sun, it rises"; these renderings reflect a discourse fragment in which "the sun" is being established as the topic of an extended discussion.
Liberal omission of the subject of a sentence
The grammatical subject is commonly omitted in Japanese, as inThe sentence literally expresses "went to Japan". Subjects are mentioned when a topic is introduced, or in situations where an ambiguity might result from their omission. The preceding example sentence would most likely be uttered in the middle of a discourse, where who it is that "went to Japan" will be clear from what has already been said.
Sentences, phrases and words
Text is composed of sentences, which are in turn composed of phrases, which are its smallest coherent components. Like Chinese and classical Korean, written Japanese does not typically demarcate words with spaces; its agglutinative nature further makes the concept of a word rather different from words in English. The reader identifies word divisions by semantic cues and a knowledge of phrase structure. Phrases have a single meaning-bearing word, followed by a string of suffixes, auxiliary verbs and particles to modify its meaning and designate its grammatical role. In the following example, phrases are indicated by vertical bars:Some scholars romanize Japanese sentences by inserting spaces only at phrase boundaries, treating an entire phrase as a single word. This represents an almost purely phonological conception of where one word ends and the next begins. There is some validity in taking this approach: phonologically, the postpositional particles merge with the structural word that precedes them, and within a phonological phrase, the pitch can have at most one fall. Usually, however, grammarians adopt a more conventional concept of word, one which invokes meaning and sentence structure.
Word classification
In linguistics generally, words and affixes are often classified into two major word categories: lexical words, those that refer to the world outside of a discourse, and function words—also including fragments of words—which help to build the sentence in accordance with the grammar rules of the language. Lexical words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and sometimes prepositions and postpositions, while grammatical words or word parts include everything else. The native tradition in Japanese grammar scholarship seems to concur in this view of classification. This native Japanese tradition uses the terminology, for words having lexical meaning, and, for words having a grammatical function.Classical Japanese had some auxiliary verbs which have become grammaticized in modern Japanese as inflectional suffixes, such as the past tense suffix -ta.
Traditional scholarship proposes a system of word classes differing somewhat from the above-mentioned. The "independent" words have the following categories.
Ancillary words also divide into a nonconjugable class, containing grammatical particles and counter words, and a conjugable class consisting of auxiliary verbs. There is not wide agreement among linguists as to the English translations of the above terms.
Controversy over the characterization of nominal adjectives
Uehara observes that Japanese grammarians have disagreed as to the criteria that make some words "inflectional", katsuyō, and others not, in particular, the 形容動詞 keiyōdōshi – "na-adjectives" or "na-nominals". The claim that na-adjectives are inflectional rests on the claim that the syllable da 'is', usually regarded as a "copula verb", is really a suffix—an inflection. Thus hon 'book', generates a one-word sentence, honda 'it is a book', not a two-word sentence, hon da. However, numerous constructions seem to be incompatible with the suffixal copula claim.On the basis of such constructions, Uehara finds that the copula is indeed an independent word, and that regarding the parameters on which i-adjectives share the syntactic pattern of verbs, the nominal adjectives pattern with pure nouns instead.
Similarly, Eleanor Jorden considers this class of words a kind of nominal, not adjective, and refers to them as na-nominals in her textbook .
Nouns
Japanese has no grammatical gender, number, or articles. Thus, linguists agree that Japanese nouns are noninflecting: 猫 neko can be translated as "cat", "cats", "a cat", "the cat", "some cats" and so forth, depending on context. However, as part of the extensive pair of grammatical systems that Japanese possesses for honorification and politeness, nouns too can be modified. Nouns take politeness prefixes : o- for native nouns, and go- for Sino-Japanese nouns. A few examples are given in the following table. In a few cases, there is suppletion, as with the first of the examples given below, 'rice'.| meaning | plain | respectful |
| meal | 飯 meshi | ご飯 go-han |
| money | 金 kane | お金 o-kane |
| body | 体 karada | お体 o-karada 御身 onmi |
| word | 言葉 kotoba | お言葉 o-kotoba 詔 mikotonori |
Lacking number, Japanese does not differentiate between count and mass nouns. A small number of nouns have collectives formed by reduplication ; for example: hito 'person' and hitobito 'people'. Reduplication is not productive. Words in Japanese referring to more than one of something are collectives, not plurals. Hitobito, for example, means "a lot of people" or "people in general". It is never used to mean "two people". A phrase like edo no hitobito would be taken to mean "the people of Edo", or "the population of Edo", not "two people from Edo" or even "a few people from Edo". Similarly, yamayama means "many mountains".
A limited number of nouns have collective forms that refer to groups of people. Examples include watashi-tachi, 'we'; anata-tachi, 'you '; bokura, 'we '. One uncommon personal noun, ware, 'I', or in some cases, 'you', has a much more common reduplicative collective form wareware 'we'.
The suffixes -tachi and -ra are by far the most common collectivizing suffixes. These are, again, not pluralizing suffixes: tarō-tachi does not mean "some number of people named Taro", but instead indicates the group including Taro. Depending on context, tarō-tachi might be translated into "Taro and his friends", "Taro and his siblings", "Taro and his family", or any other logical grouping that has Taro as the representative. Some words with collectives have become fixed phrases and refer to one person. Specifically, kodomo 'child' and tomodachi 'friend' can be singular, even though -omo and -achi were originally collectivizing in these words; to unambiguously refer to groups of them, an additional collectivizing suffix is added: kodomotachi 'children' and tomodachitachi 'friends', though tomodachitachi is somewhat uncommon. Tachi is sometimes applied to inanimate objects, kuruma 'car' and kuruma-tachi, 'cars', for example, but this usage is colloquial and indicates a high level of anthropomorphisation and childlikeness, and is not more generally accepted as standard.
Grammatical case
s in Japanese are marked by particles placed after the nouns. A distinctive feature of Japanese is the presence of two cases which are roughly equivalent to the nominative case in other languages: one representing the sentence topic, other representing the subject. The most important case markers are the following:- Nominative – が for subject, は for the
- Genitive – の
- Dative – に
- Accusative – を
- Lative – へ, used for destination direction
- Ablative – から, used for source direction
- Instrumental – で
Pronouns
Although many grammars and textbooks mention pronouns, Japanese lacks true pronouns. Strictly speaking, pronouns do not take modifiers, but Japanese daimeishi do: 背の高い彼 se no takai kare is valid in Japanese. Also, unlike true pronouns, Japanese daimeishi are not closed-class: new daimeishi are introduced and old ones go out of use relatively quickly.
A large number of daimeishi referring to people are translated as pronouns in their most common uses. Examples: 彼 kare, ; 彼女 kanojo, ; 私 watashi, ; see also the adjoining table or a longer list. Some of these "personal nouns" such as 己 onore, I, or 僕 boku, I, also have second-person uses: おのれ onore in second-person is an extremely rude "you", and boku in second-person is a diminutive "you" used for young boys. Kare and kanojo also mean "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" respectively, and this usage of the words is possibly more common than the use as pronouns.
Like other subjects, Japanese deemphasizes personal daimeishi, which are seldom used. This is partly because Japanese sentences do not always require explicit subjects, and partly because names or titles are often used where pronouns would appear in a translation:
The possible referents of daimeishi are sometimes constrained depending on the order of occurrence. The following pair of examples from Bart Mathias illustrates one such constraint.
Reflexive pronouns
English has a reflexive form of each personal pronoun ; Japanese, in contrast, has one main reflexive daimeishi, namely jibun, which can also mean 'I'. The uses of the reflexive nouns in the two languages are very different, as demonstrated by the following literal translations :| English | Japanese | reason |
| History repeats itself. | *Rekishi wa jibun o kurikaesu. | the target of jibun must be animate |
| Hiroshi talked to Kenji about himself. | Hiroshi wa Kenji ni jibun no koto o hanashita. | there is no ambiguity in the translation as explained below |
| *Makoto expects that Shizuko will take good care of himself. | ??誠は静子が自分を大事にすることを期待している。 ??Makoto wa Shizuko ga jibun o daiji ni suru koto o kitai shite iru. either "Makoto expects that Shizuko will take good care of him", or "Makoto expects that Shizuko will take good care of herself." | jibun can be in a different sentence or dependent clause, but its target is ambiguous |
If the sentence has more than one grammatical or semantic subject, then the target of jibun is the subject of the primary or most prominent action; thus in the following sentence jibun refers unambiguously to Shizuko because the primary action is Shizuko's reading.
In practice the main action is not always discernible, in which case such sentences are ambiguous. The use of jibun in complex sentences follows non-trivial rules.
There are also equivalents to jibun such as mizukara. Other uses of the reflexive pronoun in English are covered by adverbs like hitorideni which is used in the sense of "by oneself". For example,
Change in a verb's valency is not accomplished by use of reflexive pronouns. Instead, separate intransitive verbs and transitive verbs are used. There is no longer any productive morphology to derive transitive verbs from intransitive ones, or vice versa.
Demonstratives
| ko- | so- | a- | do- | |
| -re | kore this one | sore that one | are that one over there | dore which one? |
| -no | kono this | sono that | ano that over there | dono what? |
| -nna | konna like this | sonna like that | anna like that over there | donna what sort of? |
| -ko | koko here | soko there | asoko1 over there | doko where? |
| -chira3 | kochira this way | sochira that way | achira that way over there | dochira which way? |
| -u2 | kō in this manner | sō in that manner | ā1 in that manner | dō how? in what manner? |
| -itsu | koitsu this person | soitsu that person | aitsu that person | doitsu who? |
Demonstratives occur in the ko-, so-, and a- series. The ko- series refers to things closer to the speaker than the hearer, the so- series for things closer to the hearer, and the a- series for things distant to both the speaker and the hearer. With do-, demonstratives turn into the corresponding interrogative form. Demonstratives can also be used to refer to people, for example
Demonstratives limit, and therefore precede, nouns; thus この本 kono hon for "this/my book", and その本 sono hon for "that/your book".
When demonstratives are used to refer to things not visible to the speaker or the hearer, or to concepts, they fulfill a related but different anaphoric role. The anaphoric distals are used for shared information between the speaker and the listener.
Soko instead of asoko would imply that B doesn't share this knowledge about Sapporo, which is inconsistent with the meaning of the sentence. The anaphoric medials are used to refer to experience or knowledge that is not shared between the speaker and listener.
Again, ano is inappropriate here because Sato doesn't know Tanaka personally. The proximal demonstratives do not have clear anaphoric uses. They can be used in situations where the distal series sound too disconnected:
Conjugable words
Stem forms
Prior to discussing the conjugable words, a brief note about stem forms. Conjugative suffixes and auxiliary verbs are attached to the stem forms of the affixee. In modern Japanese there are the following six stem forms.Note that this order follows from the -a, -i, -u, -e, -o endings that these forms have in 五段 verbs, where terminal and attributive forms are the same for verbs, but differ for nominals, notably na-nominals.
; Irrealis form -a : is used for plain negative, causative and passive constructions. The most common use of this form is with the -nai auxiliary that turns verbs into their negative form. The -ō version is used for volitional expression and formed by a euphonic change.
; Continuative form -i: is used in a linking role. This is the most productive [|stem form], taking on a variety of endings and auxiliaries, and can even occur independently in a sense similar to the -te ending. This form is also used to negate adjectives.
; Terminal form -u: is used at the ends of clauses in predicate positions. This form is also variously known as plain form or dictionary form – it is the form that verbs are listed under in a dictionary.
; Attributive form -u: is prefixed to nominals and is used to define or classify the noun, similar to a relative clause in English. In modern Japanese it is practically identical to the terminal form, except that verbs are generally not inflected for politeness; in old Japanese these forms differed. Further, na-nominals behave differently in terminal and attributive positions; see adjectives, below.
; Hypothetical form -e: is used for conditional and subjunctive forms, using the -ba ending.
; Imperative form -e: is used to turn verbs into commands. Adjectives do not have an imperative stem form.
The application of conjugative suffixes to stem forms follow certain euphonic principles, which are discussed below.
Verbs
Verbs in Japanese are rigidly constrained to the ends of clauses in what is known as the predicate position. This means that the verb is always located at the end of a sentence.The subject and objects of the verb are indicated by means of particles, and the grammatical functions of the verb — primarily tense and voice — are indicated by means of conjugation. When the subject and the dissertative topic coincide, the subject is often omitted; if the verb is intransitive, the entire sentence may consist of a single verb. Verbs have two tenses indicated by conjugation, past and nonpast. The semantic difference between present and future is not indicated by means of conjugation. Usually there is no ambiguity as context makes it clear whether the speaker is referring to the present or future. Voice and aspect are also indicated by means of conjugation, and possibly agglutinating auxiliary verbs. For example, the continuative aspect is formed by means of the continuative conjugation known as the gerundive or -te form, and the auxiliary verb iru "to be"; to illustrate, 見る miru → 見ている mite iru.
Verbs can be semantically classified based on certain conjugations.
; Stative verbs: indicate existential properties, such as "to be", "to be able to do", "to need", etc. These verbs generally do not have a continuative conjugation with -iru because they are semantically continuative already.
; Continual verbs: conjugate with the auxiliary -iru to indicate the progressive aspect. Examples: "to eat", "to drink", "to think". To illustrate the conjugation, 食べる taberu → 食べている tabete iru.
; Punctual verbs: conjugate with -iru to indicate a repeated action, or a continuing state after some action. Example: 知る shiru → 知っている shitte iru ; 打つ utsu → 打っている utte iru.
; Non-volitional verb: indicate uncontrollable action or emotion. These verbs generally have no volitional, imperative or potential conjugation. Examples: 好む konomu, "to like / to prefer", 見える mieru, "to be visible".
; Movement verbs: indicate motion. Examples: 歩く aruku, 帰る kaeru. In the continuative form they take the particle ni to indicate a purpose.
There are other possible classes, and a large amount of overlap between the classes.
Lexically, nearly every verb in Japanese is a member of exactly one of the following three regular conjugation groups.
; Group 2a : verbs with a stem ending in i. The terminal stem form always rhymes with -iru. Examples: 見る miru, 着る kiru.
; Group 2b : verbs with a stem ending in e. The terminal stem form always rhymes with -eru. Examples: 食べる taberu, くれる kureru.
; Group 1 : verbs with a stem ending in a consonant. When this is r and the verb ends in -eru, it is not apparent from the terminal form whether the verb is Group 1 or Group 2b, e.g. 帰る kaeru. If the stem ends in w, that sound only appears in before the final a of the irrealis form.
The "row" in the above classification means a row in the gojūon table. "Upper 1-row" means the row that is one row above the center row i.e. i-row. "Lower 1-row" means the row that is one row below the center row i.e. e-row. "5-row" means the conjugation runs through all 5 rows of the gojūon table. A conjugation is fully described by identifying both the row and the column in the gojūon table. For example, 見る belongs to マ行上一段活用, 食べる belongs to バ行下一段活用, and 帰る belongs to ラ行五段活用.
One should avoid confusing verbs in ラ行五段活用 with verbs in 上一段活用 or 下一段活用. For example, 切る belongs to ラ行五段活用, whereas its homophone 着る belongs to カ行上一段活用. Likewise, 練る belongs to ラ行五段活用, whereas its homophone 寝る belongs to ナ行下一段活用.
Historical note: classical Japanese had upper and lower 1- and 2-row groups and a 4-row group, and the yodan group, due to the writing reform in 1946 to write Japanese as it is pronounced, naturally became the modern godan verbs. Since verbs have migrated across groups in the history of the language, conjugation of classical verbs is not predictable from a knowledge of modern Japanese alone.
Of the irregular classes, there are two:
; sa-group: which has only one member, する .
; ka-group: which also has one member, 来る . The Japanese name for this class is カ行変格活用 ka-gyō henkaku katsuyō or simply カ変 ka-hen.
Classical Japanese had two further irregular classes, the na-group, which contained 死ぬ and 往ぬ , the ra-group, which included such verbs as あり ari, the equivalent of modern aru, as well as quite a number of extremely irregular verbs that cannot be classified.
The following table illustrates the stem forms of the above conjugation groups, with the root indicated with dots. For example, to find the hypothetical form of the group 1 verb 書く kaku, look in the second row to find its root, kak, then in the hypothetical row to get the ending -e, giving the stem form kake. When there are multiple possibilities, they are listed in the order of increasing rarity.
- The -a and -o irrealis forms for Group 1 verbs were historically one, but since the post-WWII spelling reforms they have been written differently. In modern Japanese the -o form is used only for the volitional mood and the -a form is used in all other cases; see also the conjugation table below.
- The unexpected ending is due to the verb's root being tsukaw- but only being pronounced before in modern Japanese.
- This is an entirely different verb; する suru has no potential form.
- These forms change depending on the final syllable of the verb's dictionary form. For details, see [|Euphonic changes], below, and the article Japanese verb conjugation.
As should be expected, the vast majority of theoretically possible combinations of conjugative endings are not semantically meaningful.
Transitive and intransitive verbs
Japanese has a large variety of related pairs of transitive verbs and intransitive verbs, such as the transitive hajimeru, and the intransitive hajimaru.| transitive verb | intransitive verb | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One thing acts out the transitive verb on another.
| The intransitive verb passively happens without direct intervention. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Note: Some intransitive verbs take what it looks like a direct object, but it is not. For example, hanareru :Adjectival verbs and nounsSemantically speaking, words that denote attributes or properties are primarily distributed between two morphological classes :
Every adjective in Japanese can be used in an attributive position. Nearly every Japanese adjective can be used in a predicative position; this differs from English where there are many common adjectives such as "major", as in "a major question", that cannot be used in the predicate position. There are a few Japanese adjectives that cannot predicate, known as 連体詞, which are derived from other word classes; examples include 大きな ōkina "big", 小さな chiisana "small", and おかしな okashina "strange" which are all stylistic na-type variants of normal i-type adjectives. All i-adjectives except for いい have regular conjugations, and ii is irregular only in the fact that it is a changed form of the regular adjective 良い yoi permissible in the terminal and attributive forms. For all other forms it reverts to yoi.
Copula (だ ''da'')The copula da behaves very much like a verb or an adjective in terms of conjugation.
Note that there are no potential, causative, or passive forms of the copula, just as with adjectives. The following are some examples. In continuative conjugations, では de wa is often contracted in speech to じゃ ja; for some kinds of informal speech ja is preferable to de wa, or is the only possibility.
Euphonic changes (音便 ''onbin'')Historical sound change
Modern pronunciation is a result of a long history of phonemic drift that can be traced back to written records of the thirteenth century, and possibly earlier. However, it was only in 1946 that the Japanese ministry of education modified existing kana usage to conform to the standard dialect. All earlier texts used the archaic orthography, now referred to as historical kana usage. The adjoining table is a nearly exhaustive list of these spelling changes. Note that palatalized morae combine with the initial consonant, if present, yielding a palatalized syllable. The most basic example of this is modern, which historically developed as →, via the → rule. A few sound changes are not reflected in the spelling. Firstly, ou merged with oo, both being pronounced as a long ō. Secondly, the particles は and を are still written using historical kana usage, though these are pronounced as wa and o, rather than ha and wo. Among Japanese speakers, it is not generally understood that the historical kana spellings were, at one point, reflective of pronunciation. For example, the modern on'yomi reading for leaf arose from historical. The latter was pronounced something like by the Japanese at the time it was borrowed. However, a modern reader of a classical text would still read this as, the modern pronunciation. Verb conjugationsAs mentioned above, conjugations of some verbs and adjectives differ from the prescribed formation rules because of euphonic changes. Nearly all of these euphonic changes are themselves regular. For verbs the exceptions are all in the ending of the continuative form of group when the following auxiliary starts with a t-sound, i.e., た ta, て te, たり tari, etc.
There are dialectical differences, which are also regular and generally occur in similar situations. For example, in Kansai dialect the -i + t- conjugations are instead changed to -ut-, as in instead of, as perfective of. In this example, this can combine with the preceding vowel via historical sound changes, as in instead of standard. Polite forms of adjectivesThe continuative form of proper adjectives, when followed by polite forms such as or, undergoes a transformation; this may be followed by historical sound changes, yielding a one-step or two-step sound change. Note that these verbs are almost invariably conjugated to polite form, as and , and that these verbs are preceded by the continuative form – – of adjectives, rather than the terminal form – – which is used before the more everyday.The rule is → , possibly also combining with the previous syllable according to the spelling reform chart, which may also undergo palatalization in the case of. Historically there were two classes of proper Old Japanese adjectives, and . This distinction collapsed during the evolution of Late Middle Japanese adjectives, and both are now considered adjectives. The sound change for -shii adjectives follows the same rule as for other -ii adjectives, notably that the preceding vowel also changes and the preceding mora undergoes palatalization, yielding →, though historically this was considered a separate but parallel rule.
Respectful verbsRespectful verbs such as くださる kudasaru 'to get', なさる nasaru 'to do', ござる gozaru 'to be', いらっしゃる irassharu 'to be/come/go', おっしゃる ossharu 'to say', etc. behave like group 1 verbs, except in the continuative and imperative forms.
Colloquial contractionsIn speech, common combinations of conjugation and auxiliary verbs are contracted in a fairly regular manner.
There are occasional others, such as -aranai → -annai as in → and → – these are considered quite casual and are more common among the younger generation. Contractions differ by dialect, but behave similarly to the standard ones given above. For example, in Kansai dialect →. Other independent wordsAdverbsAdverbs in Japanese are not as tightly integrated into the morphology as in many other languages. Indeed, adverbs are not an independent class of words, but rather a role played by other words. For example, every adjective in the continuative form can be used as an adverb; thus, 弱い yowai 'weak' → 弱く yowaku 'weakly'. The primary distinguishing characteristic of adverbs is that they cannot occur in a predicate position, just as it is in English. The following classification of adverbs is not intended to be authoritative or exhaustive.; Verbal adverbs: are verbs in the continuative form with the particle ni. E.g. 見る miru 'to see' → 見に mi ni 'for the purpose of seeing', used for instance as: 見に行く mi ni iku, go to see . ; Adjectival adverbs: are adjectives in the continuative form, as mentioned above. Example: 弱い yowai 'weak' → 弱く yowaku 'weakly' ; Nominal adverbs: are grammatical nouns that function as adverbs. Example: 一番 ichiban 'most highly'. ; Sound symbolism: are words that mimic sounds or concepts. Examples: きらきら kirakira 'sparklingly', ぽっくり pokkuri 'suddenly', するする surusuru 'smoothly ', etc. Often, especially for sound symbolism, the particle to "as if" is used. See the article on Japanese sound symbolism. Conjunctions and interjectionsExamples of conjunctions: そして soshite 'and then', また mata 'and then/again', etc.Although called "conjunctions", these words are, as English translations show, actually a kind of adverb. Examples of interjections: はい, へえ, いいえ, おい, etc. This part of speech is not very different from that of English. Ancillary wordsParticlesParticles in Japanese are postpositional, as they immediately follow the modified component. A full listing of particles is beyond the scope of this article, so only a few prominent particles are listed here. Keep in mind that the pronunciation and spelling differ for the particles wa, e and o : This article follows the Hepburn-style of romanizing them according to the pronunciation rather than spelling.Topic, theme, and subject: は ''wa'' and が ''ga''The complex distinction between the so-called topic and subject particles has been the theme of many doctoral dissertations and scholarly disputes. The clause 象は鼻が長い zō-wa hana-ga nagai is well known for appearing to contain two subjects. It does not simply mean "the elephant's nose is long", as that can be translated as 象の鼻は長い zō-no hana-wa nagai. Rather, a more literal translation would be " the elephant, its nose is long", furthermore, as Japanese does not distinguish between singular and plural the way English does, it could also mean "as for elephants, their noses are long".Two major scholarly surveys of Japanese linguistics in English, and, clarify the distinction. To simplify matters, the referents of wa and ga in this section are called the topic and subject respectively, with the understanding that if either is absent, the grammatical topic and subject may coincide. As an abstract and rough approximation, the difference between wa and ga is a matter of focus: wa gives focus to the action of the sentence, i.e., to the verb or adjective, whereas ga gives focus to the subject of the action. However, a more useful description must proceed by enumerating uses of these particles. However, when first being introduced to the topic and subject markers wa and ga most are told that the difference between the two is simpler. The topic marker, wa, is used to declare or to make a statement. The subject marker, ga, is used for new information, or asking for new information. ''See. Thematic ''wa''The use of wa to introduce a new theme of discourse is directly linked to the notion of grammatical theme. Opinions differ on the structure of discourse theme, though it seems fairly uncontroversial to imagine a first-in-first-out hierarchy of themes that is threaded through the discourse. Of course, human limitations restrict the scope and depth of themes, and later themes may cause earlier themes to expire. In these sorts of sentences, the steadfast translation into English uses constructs like "speaking of X" or "on the topic of X", though such translations tend to be bulky as they fail to use the thematic mechanisms of English. For lack of a comprehensive strategy, many teachers of Japanese emphasize the "speaking of X" pattern without sufficient warning.A common linguistic joke shows the insufficiency of rote translation with the sentence 僕はウナギだ boku wa unagi da, which per the pattern would translate as "I am an eel.". Yet, in a restaurant this sentence can reasonably be used to say "My order is eel", with no intended humour. This is because the sentence should be literally read, "As for me, it is an eel," with "it" referring to the speaker's order. The topic of the sentence is clearly not its subject. Contrastive ''wa''Related to the role of wa in introducing themes is its use in contrasting the current topic and its aspects from other possible topics and their aspects. The suggestive pattern is "X, but..." or "as for X,...".Because of its contrastive nature, the topic cannot be undefined. In this use, ga is required. In practice, the distinction between thematic and contrastive wa is not that useful. Suffice it to say that there can be at most one thematic wa in a sentence, and it has to be the first wa if one exists, and the remaining was are contrastive. For completeness, the following sentence illustrates the difference. The first interpretation is the thematic wa, treating "the people I know" as the theme of the predicate "none came". That is, if I know A, B,..., Z, then none of the people who came were A, B,..., Z. The second interpretation is the contrastive wa. If the likely attendees were A, B,..., Z, and of them I know P, Q and R, then the sentence says that P, Q and R did not come. The sentence says nothing about A', B',..., Z', all of whom I know, but none of whom were likely to come. Exhaustive ''ga''Unlike wa, the subject particle ga nominates its referent as the sole satisfier of the predicate. This distinction is famously illustrated by the following pair of sentences.It may be useful to think of the distinction in terms of the question each statement could answer, e.g.: for the first statement, versus for the second. Similarly, in a restaurant, if the waitress asks who has ordered the eels, the customer who ordered it can say Objective ''ga''For certain verbs, typically ga instead of o is used to mark what would be the direct object in English:These notions that would be thought of as actions, or "verbs" in English, e.g. 出来る, ほしい, 好きだ, 嫌いだ, etc., are in fact simply adjectives and intransitive verbs whose subject is what would be a direct object in the English translation. The equivalent of the English subject is instead the topic in Japanese and thus marked by wa, reflecting the topic-prominent nature of Japanese grammar. Objects, locatives, instrumentals: を ''o'', で ''de'', に ''ni'', へ ''e''The direct object of transitive verbs is indicated by the object particle を o.This particle can also mean "through" or "along" or "out of" when used with motion verbs. The general instrumental particle is で de, which can be translated as "using" or "by": This particle also has other uses: "at" : "In": "With" or "in ": The general locative particle is に ni. In this function it is interchangeable with へ e. However, ni has additional uses: "at ": "On": "In ", "at ": Quantity and extents: と ''to'', も ''mo'', か ''ka'', や ''ya'', から ''kara'', まで ''made''To conjoin nouns, と to is used.The additive particle も mo can be used to conjoin larger nominals and clauses. For an incomplete list of conjuncts, や ya is used. When only one of the conjuncts is necessary, the disjunctive particle か ka is used. Quantities are listed between から kara 'from' and まで made 'to'. This pair can also be used to indicate time or space. Because kara indicates starting point or origin, it has a related use as "because", analogously to English "" : The particle kara and a related particle yori are used to indicate lowest extents: prices, business hours, etc. Yori is also used in the sense of "than". Coordinating: と ''to'', に ''ni'', よ ''yo''The particle と to is used to set off quotations.It is also used to indicate a manner of similarity, "as if", "like" or "the way". In a related conditional use, it functions like "after/when", or "upon". Finally it is used with verbs like to meet or to speak . This last use is also a function of the particle に ni, but to indicates reciprocation which ni does not. Finally, the particle よ yo is used in a hortative or vocative sense. Final: か ''ka'', ね ''ne'', よ ''yo'' and relatedThe sentence-final particle か ka turns a declarative sentence into a question.Other sentence-final particles add emotional or emphatic impact to the sentence. The particle ね ne softens a declarative sentence, similar to English "you know?", "eh?", "I tell you!", "isn't it?", "aren't you?", etc. A final よ yo is used in order to soften insistence, warning or command, which would sound very strong without any final particles. There are many such emphatic particles; some examples: ぜ ze and ぞ zo usually used by males; な na a less formal form of ne; わ wa used by females like yo, etc. They are essentially limited to speech or transcribed dialogue. Compound particlesCompound particles are formed with at least one particle together with other words, including other particles. The commonly seen forms are:
Auxiliary verbsAll auxiliary verbs attach to a verbal or adjectival stem form and conjugate as verbs. In modern Japanese there are two distinct classes of auxiliary verbs:; Pure auxiliaries : are usually just called verb endings or conjugated forms. These auxiliaries do not function as independent verbs. ; Helper auxiliaries : are normal verbs that lose their independent meaning when used as auxiliaries. In classical Japanese, which was more heavily agglutinating than modern Japanese, the category of auxiliary verb included every verbal ending after the stem form, and most of these endings were themselves inflected. In modern Japanese, however, some of them have stopped being productive. The prime example is the classical auxiliary たり -tari, whose modern forms た -ta and て -te are no longer viewed as inflections of the same suffix, and can take no further affixes.
Much of the agglutinative flavour of Japanese stems from helper auxiliaries, however. The following table contains a small selection of many such auxiliary verbs.
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