Talk:Japanese grammar/GA1

GA Reassessment

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This review might take a bit, and I'll only paste it to the talk page when I'm done with it.

General points

1. Well-written: The article seems to contain several unconventional formulations up to mistakes in English grammar. But I’m not a native speaker and not really able to fix this matter. On the other hand, it wouldn’t take too much work to fix this point.

2. Factually accurate and verifiable: The article is predominantly factually accurate (see below), but several points can only be verified by an expert with some knowledge of literature on Japanese grammar. Thus, in-line referencing is totally inadequate.

3. Broad in its coverage: The article is very formalist and neglects function to some degree. For example, double accusatives or phrase order are not discussed.

4. Neutral: The article heavily leans towards traditional Japanese grammar. Given that modern linguistics is the most advanced (and hopefully, objective) research tradition, this is clearly non-neutral.

5. Stable: Yes.

6. illustrated, if possible, by images: I don't know whether it would be possible, but it is certainly not necessary.

Specific points

Lead

is too short.

Word order: head final and left branching

• Requires a general reference that introduces some typological infos on Japanese. Alternatively, any grammar may be used, but then we might possibly need some English grammar as well.
• “usually attributed to Joseph Greenberg” is not as innocent-looking as it might be perceived and would certainly require a source of its own.
• The framework of this section is that of a phrase-structure grammar, that is, it is not theory-independent.

Unusual word class system

• This is an oversimplification of a continuum of nominal modifiers, eg ookii vs. ookina that is not member of two classes, but just intermediate. A semantic analysis for this has been attempted (quoted somewhere in Croft’s Radical construction grammar) and should be quoted if it is not refuted elsewhere. If refuted, it might still be quoted in a footnote.
• It is of course possible to retain the original analysis given in this section, but as it is certainly not uncontroversial, it should be neatly quoted.
• It is a quite encompassing claim that ALL loans from Chinese are at least verbal nouns. I'd expect that there might be a test X suru vs. *X suru, but that would require virtually every Chinese noun to allow for X suru - and I would indeed check a source that is claimed to make such a claim.
• The analogy of verbal nouns to gerunds is ridiculous. There should be some better attempt to illustrate this category.

Japanese as a topic-prominent language

• This chapter doesn’t address its issue. It merely gives a very short explanation what topic-prominence might be, but not inhowfar Japanese gives prominence to topics (ie vs. subjects).
• Some general literature on topicality should be included into the (as of now) non-existent in-line references.

Liberal omission of the subject of a sentence

• This info is misleading. First, only because English is exceptional in its vast usage of personal pronouns, this doesn’t make the rampant phenomenon notable that overt personal pronouns can usually be dropped in many of the world’s languages. Second, the prominence of topic in Japanese seems just to contradict this statement. If the language is topic-prominent, why do we frequently drop the topics? Of course, if we’d discuss sentences of the structure tree wa leaf ga green, a peculiarity of Japanese would become clear. One might also address this issue by giving an example of ni wa.

Sentences, phrases and words

• “Usually, however, grammarians adopt a more conventional concept of word (単語 tango), one which invokes meaning and sentence structure.” What is meant by the last clause here?
• For the most part of this section, a single reference might do. Only statements such as “Some scholars” need slightly better referencing.

Word classification

• If we venture to discuss traditional Japanese grammar, it has to be placed into some non-western (or older western) grammar tradition to be understandable.

Nouns

• „(boku, a word for 'I' which discussions of the language unfailingly cite, actually is a word that is only used in informal situations among adolescent boys)“. One must be exceedingly careful with such generalizations as the people stating them may hold some kind of language attitude themselves. Thus, we either need some kind of consensus (including statements in monolingual dictionaries) or a study that indeed surveyed the distribution of this item.
• „but this usage is colloquial and indicates a high level of anthropomorphisation and childlikeness, and is not more generally accepted as standard.” Dito. Either colloquial or childish, that’s not the same at all. Or either, but then you cannot write “colloquial and indicates”.
• A general observation: Vowel length must be included in transcriptions.

Conjugable words

• One should discuss why assuming forms like mizenkei etc. (that apparently follow grammar tradition and kana writing) is superior to an analysis that poses -(a)nai – if this is the case. If not (and the presence of renkaikei next to shuushikei points in that direction), such an analysis might at best be given as traditional and then be refuted. (Basically, the distribution of verb suffixes would correspond to consonantal and vowel stem verbs.)
• “Continual verbs” – very rare terminology. Should be replaced by “activity verbs” or something like that. Anyway, a reference would certainly have its merits here. “Punctual verbs … indicate … a continuing state after some action.” Another funny thing. Punctual verbs are the other way round, possibly including the pre-phase of an action, but not the subsequent state after a result. I know this isn’t Vendlerian, but even general linguistics in the US has (sometimes) progressed further than that now. Difficult to make a good suggestion, but in the terminology of Walter Breu we would probably be talking about an “inceptive state” in case of sir-. Consequently, ut- and sir- don’t belong to the same class of verbs.
• The semantic categorization of the verbs itself is not transparent. Some of it is according to their aktionsart, some of it not. If aktionsart is the main criterion, the other criteria should probably establish subclassifications to the aktionsart analysis.
• “keiyōshi … and are semantically and morphologically similar to stative verbs.” If keiyoushi are morphologically more similar to stative verbs than to, eg, movement verbs, this should be explained somewhere.
• “In continuative conjugations, では (de wa) is often contracted in speech to じゃ (ja)”. If I remember correctly, this is a myth, ja being a loan from western Japanese varieties. Someone should cross-check this with competent dialectological work. (Naturally, school grammarians cannot be trusted on this point.)

Other independent words

• mi-ni iku is not an instance of an adverbial in the traditional form, as mi- is controlled by iku. It is ad-verbial all right, but that is irrelevant here. So, are there FREE uses of mi-ni etc.?
• Do we have conjunctions that are limited to absolute clause-initial position? This would merit mentioning. I would also tend to mention “node” etc. in this context because of its functional similarity.

Ancillary words

• wa „replaces“ ga AND o, so it might merit to include o into the general discussion as well. (A minor point as the literature often doesn’t take this approach as well. Yet, if we enter any discussion on grammatical relations, this becomes highly relevant.)
• “Unlike wa, the subject particle ga nominates its referent as the sole satisfier of the predicate.” Given the general literature on focus, such a statement is likely to be very controversial (ie it is partisan within this discussion). Such a claim needs several sources, and some among them should be more recent.
• boku ga unagi da is amazing, as it seems to show that ga basically indicates focus and not at all subjecthood.
• “For stative transitive verbs, ga instead of o is typically used to mark the object.” I’d not expect that this holds for all transitive stative predications. (I don’t have at hand the relevant literature, though.) On the other hand, this matter is intrinsically related to the potential forms of verbs that MAY take ga or o, dekiru as the potential verb par excellence being limited to ga.
• de and ni should be contrasted to each other, otherwise you cannot differentiate some particular uses that seem to be overlapping.
• mo and wa may contrast, so they should also be treated together.
• koto (and maybe mono) can (and possibly should) be understood as complementizers akin to to. Not mentioning them at all in all of this article is not feasible.
• “auxiliary verbs … differ from normal verbs in having no independent meaning”. Might it be more appropriate to state that auxiliaries and the verbs they control jointly only denote one action and thus constitute complex, but never secondary predications?
• Those so-called “pure” auxiliaries seem to be nothing but suffixes. It would need a lot of justification to treat them as auxiliaries. We don’t deal with diachronics here, and neither with Japanese grammar tradition.

FA

The points I discussed so far were related to immediate problems of the article, but there is one point that I would like to mention that might only become relevant if the article was ever to become Featured article candidate. While it is of course appropriate to give very short overall descriptions in a Wikipedia article on grammar, a selected bibliography on each topic that would provide the most relevant and the most recent literature (so that most other relevant texts could be found in the bibliography of the cited works) would be superb und greatly enhance the usefulness of wikipedia for actual linguists.

Conclusion

As it is now, this article doesn't meet Good article requirements. By favouring Japanese traditional grammar, it is non-neutral, and it doesn't have in-line citations even for some potentially controversial statements. It has multiple smaller issues that I tried to indicate in the specifics section. (I'd expect that some of the more specific points I made may be subject to discussiion (which might prove insightful, should it happen to arise), but that doesn't amend the point that the article should be more neatly researched. In the end, the article is about Japanese grammar, most likely the best-described non-Indo-Germanic grammar of the world. This article should somehow reflect this profound research tradition.)

G Purevdorj (talk) 10:37, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

As there has been no reaction within a week, I close this GAR by demoting the article. G Purevdorj (talk) 17:21, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Yet another form of adjective

In the section of "Adjectives", only two forms out of three I believe are listed, namely '-i' and '-na' type. Yet there is definitely in modern Japanese language another form of adjective, which, though typically classified into the category of "形容動詞"(as with '-na type'), features some very different conjugation from that of '-na' type adjectives. These words are also called taru-to type (たる・と形容動詞) adjectives. Fro example, 堂々たる（meaning roughly 'aboveboard'）should fall into this category. When used in its adjective form decorating noun, it follows as aforementioned form, ending with たる(-taru). While used as an adverb, you speak "堂々と + verb". That is, with 堂々 being the root, it conjugates between たる(taru) and と(to), not な(na) and に(ni).

Some deeper study may be needed to perfect its conjugation rules, of which I know only a little as said above.--Nrgbooster (talk) 11:30, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

• The -taru adjective class is very limited in the modern language, and it has been a closed class for longer.

Broadly speaking, the modern -na adjectives and the obsolescent -taru adjectives share a heritage -- both were formed as [NOUN]-ish root word + [COPULA FORM] + あり (basic verb meaning “to be”). Research by Bjarne Frellesvig and others suggests that there were two kinds of copula in the ancient language, one based on a T stem and another on an N stem. The T stem persists as modern particle と, while the N stem persists as modern particle に and in modern verb なる (“to become”). The -taru adjectives formed as:

• [NOUN] + と in the adverbial form
• [NOUN] + と + ある in the attributive (modifying a noun) form, contracting to [NOUN]たる
• [NOUN] + と + あり in the terminal (sentence-final) form, contracting to [NOUN]たり

Similarly for the classical -nari adjectives:

• [NOUN] + に in the adverbial form
• [NOUN] + に + ある in the attributive (modifying a noun) form, contracting to [NOUN]なる
• [NOUN] + に + あり in the terminal (sentence-final) form, contracting to [NOUN]なり

As the classical verb あり changed into modern ある, so too did the terminal forms shift from ending in -ari to ending in -aru. The -naru adjectives also shortened to just -na, likely just normal erosion from regular use.

Interestingly, the way that modern -i adjectives "conjugate" like verbs is also entirely because of fusion with the actual verb あり. At the rawest forms, -i adjectives used to be -ki adjectives, and they only had three basic forms:

• ending in -shi in the terminal form (this has been replaced with the modern attributive ending -i)
• ending in -ku in the adverbial form
• ending in -ki in the attributive form

(Things were a little more complicated, with adjectives that end in -shii in modern Japanese having slightly different patterns, but the above still holds true.)

All of the other conjugations -- past tense -atta, presumptive -arō, imperative -are, etc. -- were all formed by contraction with あり. Some examples with 暑い (atsui, “hot”):

• Past tense: 暑かった == 暑く + あった
• Presumptive: 暑かろう == 暑く + あろう
• Hypothetical: 暑けれ == 暑く + あれ, with the vowel influenced by けれ (from older fusion of past recollective き + あれ -- see also wikt:けれども)
• Imperative: 暑かれ == 暑く + あれ

So we have three basic types of adjectives, with the -taru adjectives the least common and the most old-fashioned. It also bears noting that many terms classed as -na adjectives in dictionaries may be used more commonly with the particle の instead, such as 本当 (hontō, “real, true”), as in 本当の話 (hontō no hanashi, “a real story, a true tale”).

HTH! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 01:48, 19 November 2016 (UTC)