I’d call it an adverbial noun but I agree that in the small class of words like ずっと、もっと、ゆっくり、etc, calling them adverbs isn’t a terrible idea. But what I unfortunately see a lot of is calling things like 急に (adverbial nouns) or 優しく (adverbial verbs/i-adjectives) “adverbs” which is a flimsy and confusing model imo. Words like ずっと、もっと, ゆっくり are a relatively small set of nouns that have the power to drop the にorと particles that are used to form adverbial noun phrases (in fact, ずっと、もっと pretty clearly evolved from noun phrases ending in と). I find it simpler to just think of these as nouns that have adverbial English translations. This is mostly just to simplify the structure of my model (which is pretty similar to Cure Dolly’s model) - this way, you really only have to deal with nouns, verbs, i-adjectives, particles, conjunctions, and the copula.
In the end though, there is no objective true grammatical model, only more and less useful ones, and I don’t think the classification of adverb is a particularly useful one for Japanese.
Thank you for explaining! If it’s labeled 副詞 in Japanese, I’m going to continue calling it an adverb in English, but I can see where you’re coming from.
Yes, but, we deal with adverbs all the time in English. They’re words that modify the verb, same as adjectives modify nouns. How does treating them as “nouns that behave funny” simplify things?
And how do you make an adverb in English? Well, a lot of the time, you take an adjective, like “kind”, and add a “ly” on the back - “kindly”. Same as 優しい becomes 優しく. The concept directly correlates.
I don’t think the model pretends that they don’t exist. Rather, it just redefines the term as an adverbial noun rather than an adverb.
It kinda does. At least for me.
Japanese is a very object oriented language to use a programming term. It’s less “noun” as part of speech and more “noun-thing” as a modifiable concept. If you further subclass those nouns you can build a grammatical model of Japanese that works as well as traditional models and maybe better in some cases for some people.
But again, there’s an intuitive leap that’s necessary and it’s definitely not the only model.
Thinking about a natural language in programming language terms just blew my mind. I’m not sure how useful the metaphor is, but either way I love it. Thanks for this!
‘Confusing’, I can understand, because you seem to prefer having fewer grammatical classes to deal with, but ‘flimsy’? Would you care to explain?
I’d just like you to consider the fact that 副詞(=adverb) is a separate class used in Japanese grammar. You’re free to use what you want, but why in the world would Japanese linguists adopt a foreign concept if it’s useless to their language? It might have been a concept inherited from Chinese grammar, but Chinese and Japanese use different terms for concepts as common as the ‘object’ (賓語 in Chinese; 目的語 in Japanese), so I strongly doubt the concept of adverb would have been kept around for nothing. The monolingual definition I’m looking at for 副詞 even provides sub-classes for it, so the concept has clearly been developed quite a bit by Japanese linguists. Also, if we’re talking about the ‘flimsiness’ of a model in the sense that it falls apart easily/has too many edge cases, consider this:
Japanese also contains words like 全然 and 突然, which can’t be used as anything other than adverbs and adjectives, in part because in the language they were taken from (Chinese, which I speak), they’re adverbs or adjectives and nothing else, which is really exceptional because Chinese words can change grammatical classes just by being put in the right place in a sentence, and without any particles being added. This is especially true for 全然 because of its meaning: I could probably still force 突然 to act as a noun in Chinese because it can function as an adjective, even if it’s more often an adverb. Classifying these things as nouns could tempt one to assume that they can function alone as the subjects or topics of sentences, whereas that doesn’t reflect actual Japanese usage at all.
As for these…
I don’t know about the origins of ずっと and もっと because I can’t find any information on them, but OK, fair enough, it seems likely that they’re some sort of と phrase. However, if you start looking into 〜っ〜り words, I think you’ll start to see a different picture…
Never mind whether or not calling what comes before と a ‘noun’ lines up with Japanese usage (i.e. whether or not they’re actually used as nouns in Japanese). Isn’t calling them nouns misrepresenting their true nature? Let’s leave ゆっくり aside. Take a look at other 〜っ〜り words like こっそり and ひっそり. Notice how they have corresponding non- 〜っ〜り forms like こそこそ and ひそひそ with very similar meanings? These things aren’t ‘noun phrases’. They’re onomatopoeia. They capture a certain impression, and tend to be used only adverbially because they are by nature a description of the manner in which something is happening. Why should they be lumped together with all other nouns? Yes, if you look into Classical Japanese poetry, you can find some support for the ‘noun phrase’ idea, but that only existed because と (the quotation particle) had a function back then that has since narrowed: it was once OK to use [noun]+と in order to create a simile and say that something behaved ‘like [noun]’. However, the difference is this: in modern Japanese, for true nouns, these ‘[noun]+と’ phrases can be converted into ‘[noun]のように’. In the case of ゆっくり（と）and company, however, this is not possible because these words are not nouns in their own right, but impressions.
Ultimately, just as you can say that the standard model used by most Japanese linguists introduces too many classes, I too can say that the ‘everything is a noun’ model (yes, this is a gross oversimplification that shouldn’t be taken literally, but you know what I’m referring to) risks causing enormous amounts of confusion by classifying things with very different grammatical characteristics all as nouns even though they can’t all be used in the same syntactic contexts. The only way out of this confusion is creating subcategories of nouns, or knowing that some of these ‘nouns’ must be followed by a particle, or that they must be considered as action modifiers (i.e. as adverbs). I think that effectively brings us back to the same set of problems that led to the rise of the adverb class. If, however, you feel that what I’ve raised above are not edge cases, or that they are not exceptions that merit consideration, and that your model that relies on understanding these things as nouns is more helpful for you, then I hope that that model will continue to serve you well and not cause you any frustration down the road.
I guess either classification is possible, but it seems that 整然 must take と in order to modify an action (based on the example sentences I can find), so it might be better to treat 整然と as a single unit and classify the entire thing as an adverb. It’s apparently a たる-adjective, so it can’t stand as a noun on its own. 勝手 can function as a noun on its own, so you could either classify it as a noun with a particle (に) that creates an adverbial phrase, or you could do what you did and treat the entire block as an adverb.
In order for the relative clause before it to have a sensible function (i.e. modifying a noun), I would treat ため as a noun. As for how to explain its adverbial function, I would remind myself that ため and ために are generally treated as having the same meaning, and that as such, に, the adverbial marker, has simply been omitted.
My understanding is that it’s technically a 接続助詞, which should translate as… ‘conjunction’, I think? It’s still a type of 助詞 though, so if you consider all 助詞 ‘particles’, there’s no problem with that classification from a technical standpoint.
But adverbial nouns are a separate concept. Anything that is labeled as 副 in a dictionary is an actual adverb, not an adverbial noun. @Jonapedia already covered my opinion pretty well, but my point is that if you call adverbs “adverbial nouns”, but they act exactly the same as adverbs (i.e. they are used adverbially and can’t stand alone as nouns), all you’ve done is make it harder to differentiate two distinct things that aren’t actually used the same. Finally, I’d like to point to a dictionary entry on 結果, which starts with “副詞的に用いて”. That is actually an adverbial noun.
I am going with your idea of including the と in 整然と, thank you!
Yes, I’m counting all 助詞 as particles.
When I was working on a different first page today, I had another very similar usage of ため that made me think about it again. I knew that ため got hooked up to by other things in the same way a noun does (若いため, 行くため, 静かなため, etc), so it’s easy to reclassify it in my mind as a noun. However, I now think it and the whole thing modifying it are an adverbial phrase, and maybe I want to treat that separately the way I’m doing noun phrases?? Nouns and noun phrases together, adverbs and adverbial phrases together, sort of thing.
Also, unrelated to @Jonapedia’s helpful reply, the first page I was working on today was from the first volume of 本好きの下克上 and it is way harder to parse than the first page of コンビニ人間 was.
@Jonapedia and @seanblue I’ll try to write exactly what I mean when I get to a laptop because I think the confusion is that I’m not arguing against how it works, because that’s the reality the model has to fit, but rather the terminology and a different way of understanding that reality.
I guess you could do that, but then you might want to consider what the equivalent of the ‘main noun’ would be for those adverbial phrases. I personally think what we’re seeing with ため is similar to the 副詞的に用いて usage for 結果 mentioned by @seanblue:
As such, I would tend to treat this as a noun phrase with an adverbial meaning. However, I suppose you could mark these phrases based on their function rather than on their form, in which case you could do something like identifying what gives it an adverbial character and noting how that’s modified by everything else.
I think I am done with this page of コンビニ人間, so I put the final version up in the first post. I thought I’d do the longest noun phrase (inspired by @Belthazar) of this one before moving on to 本好きの下克上 (which will not defeat me!!).
Doing this, I learned that onomatopoeia words are often adverbs, but in this case I think it’s just a sound, so I used pink for onomatopoeia. I also thought more about what numbers are than I ever have before, lol, but I went with noun because that it is what the main meaning of 一つ was labeled as in the Japanese definitions I saw. という and 代わりに are both expressions, but I’m not really marking expressions, so I broke them down. I googled and found Tae Kim saying that いう in this sort of situation is being used as a generic verb, so I went with it.
I still welcome feedback on コンビニ人間, but now, on to 本好きの下克上!
The rules changed at work–one day a manager said, “Oh yeah, that’s totally fine,” and the next a different manager opined, “Oh no, definitely not.” I guess the clipboard wasn’t official enough.
I could do it at other times, but every other time in my day I can do it, I can also read, and reading wins. Pausing on parsing the first page of 本好きの下克上 in order to read books is at least very 本好きの下克上っぽい of me.
Speaking of, @seanblue, I hope it’s okay to ask you here, but were you also trying to read 本好き slowly enough not to catch up to publication (before it’s completed)? If so, could I ask what you’ve figured out about timing that?
That is my goal, yeah. My estimates are very shaky, mostly because when I asked @Naphthalene how many volumes are left to be published based on the completed web series, they said something like “between 30 and 35 volumes”. Since generally four volumes are published per year, an extra five volumes would add 15 months until the series is completed, which is quite the increase. Book 26 came out in April 2021. That means the series may be finished roughly sometime between April 2022 and July 2023.
Here’s more information about my estimates for how long it would take me to catch up. Just keep in mind that this all assumes that I read this series without breaks and that I always read at my current pace (about three weeks per volume), both of which are very unlikely. Right now my only immediate goal is to finish the third arc this year, which is volumes 8-12 (I’ve read volume 8 already). This is very likely since it’s only June and that’s about three months of reading for me. It’s also fairly likely I’ll dip into the fourth arc, depending on how much time I spend reading other series.
You’re welcome! By the way, I don’t think you’re following me on Bookmeter! Here’s a link in case you’re interested: seanblue - 読書メーター (and if you’re not, no worries!)
@seanblue Yes, I was following you and have you bookmarked to follow again! I had established a rule of (usually temporarily) unfollowing people who are 1. reading 本好き and 2. ahead of me, because the covers can be so spoilery. Thus I have unfollowed several people, and after Naph finished I refollowed them and then remembered the hard way that they will of course read the published ones as they come out… anyway, if I ever get ahead of you, I will refollow again. Or if I just suddenly just get less twitchy. Luckily both you and Naph post updates fairly frequently in the 多読 thread.
Nouns and noun phrases together, adverbs and adverbial phrases together, sort of thing.
Or if I just suddenly just get less twitchy. Luckily both you and Naph post updates fairly frequently in the 多読 thread. 