Attributive Verb - Japanese

Japanese

Japanese allows finite verbs to be attributive, and the following characteristics of Japanese are common among verb-final languages.

For example, in Japanese, predicative verbs come at the end of the clause, after the nouns, while attributive verbs come before the noun. These are mostly equivalent to relative clauses in English; Japanese does not have relative pronouns like "who", "which", or "when":

昨日	あの	人	歩いた。
Kinō	ano	hito	aruita.
yesterday	that	person	walked

"That person walked yesterday." (Prescriptive grammar would require the particle ga after the subject: Kinō ano hito ga aruita. In conversation, however, this is often omitted as here.)

あの	昨日	歩いた	人。
ano	kinō	aruita	hito
that	yesterday	walked	person

"that person who walked yesterday"

Japanese attributive verbs inflect for grammatical aspect, as here, and grammatical polarity, but not commonly for politeness. For example, the polite form of hito ga aruita is hito ga arukimashita, but the form arukimashita hito is not common (felt to be too polite and paraphrastic), though it is grammatically correct. Except for this, modern Japanese verbs have the same form whether predicative or attributive. (The only exception is the copula, which is da or desu when used predicatively and na when used attributively.) Historically, however, these had been separate forms. This is still the case in languages such as Korean and Turkish. The following examples illustrate the difference:

Classical Japanese:

• hito arukiki - a person walked
• arukishi hito - the person who walked

Turkish:

• Adam şiir okur "The man reads poetry."
• Şiir okuyan adam "The man who reads poetry."

Notice that all of these languages have a verb-final word order, and that none of them have relative pronouns. They also do not have a clear distinction between verbs and adjectives, as can be seen in Japanese:

• Sora (ga) aoi. "The sky is blue."
• Aoi sora "A blue sky."

In Japanese, aoi "blue" is effectively a descriptive verb rather than an adjective.