そうだね~…
…is not head-final. I agree that head-final phrase forms are fundamental to standard Japanese syntax, and once that clicks everything gets easier. Sentence-tagging particles like ね and ぞ and な and っけ are a crucially important exception to Japanese’s head-final grammar and worth pointing out.
In case this whole discussion is going whoosh over your head, have a nice big post
Japanese use a word order where a key significant word called a “head” comes after everything else, where in English it tends to come towards the beginning except when it doesn’t. Sometimes English lines up with Japanese pretty well.
Japanese makes a distinction between attributive (“stuck-to-a-noun”) and predicate (“not-stuck-to-a-noun”) verbs and verb-like adjectives and noun-like adjectives and nouns which are moonlighting as adjectives. Since this is a good way to show what head-finality means and cover how different parts of speech stick to other parts of speech, and introduce some conjugation too, and this whole idea of embedded phrases and recursion… let’s jump in and piece some things together for fun.
The heads for the examples are in bold. See if you can get a feel for how everything leads into the head…
So here’s a verb-like adjective everyone knows: かわいい (cute) kawaii.
- mouse is cute - ネズミがかわいい。nezumi ga kawaii
かわいい isn’t stuck to a noun and it’s at the end of the sentence: it’s a predicate and everything else leads up to it. かわいい is the head, everything leads up to the head.
かわいい is also in plain form here. Does it need です desu to mean “it’s cute” because です means “is”? No. This is fine. If you add です, what you’re saying is…
- mouse is cute (and I’m saying so politely) - ネズミがかわいいです。nezumi ga kawaii desu
です here doesn’t quite equal “is”. It means “mouse is cute (and I’m saying so politely)”.
Japanese gets taught to foreigners using 丁寧語 teineigo - a polite form of Japanese which strikes a balance between pleasant and uncomplicated. Teineigo means sentences tend to end in です desu or ます -masu, depending on what’s at the end of the sentence.
A plain verb-like adjective at the end of a sentence is made teineigo by popping です desu after it, and verbs are changed so they have ます at the end. (Let’s not talk about past tense or negation or verb groups just yet.)
How about when we want to say the cute mouse is doing something. First we need to talk about how to say “cute mouse” - how to give the mouse an attribute:
- cute mouse… - かわいいネズミが… kawaii nezumi…
We just put the plain adjective at the front - this isn’t a full sentence, just a “noun phrase” which is to talk about a thing. The key word of noun phrases - the “head” - is a noun, so with Japanese being “head-final” that means the noun comes last in its own chunk of the sentence.
Since we’re talking about a mouse who is already cute and say that it’s running, so we have to give ネズミ the attribute of かわいい - since it’s attributive, we use the plain form of かわいい.
Now we can say what the cute mouse is doing…
- cute mouse is running - かわいいネズミが走っている。kawaii nezumi ga hashitte-iru
To say that a verb is ongoing (is running as opposed to runs), we put the verb in て form and add いる afterwards. Since いる is last, it becomes the “head”-like bit.
What’s て form? It is one of these big topics in Japanese grammar that is too big to explain in a paragraph. For now, it’s enough to know that verbs and verb-like adjectives both have a て form, and words in て form rely on something that comes afterwards to paint the complete picture - including whether the sentence is in the present or the past.
So to act as predicates and attributes, verbs in て form need some extra glue. Here, いる is the extra glue and put together it means “some action is ongoing” or sometimes “something has come to pass”.
Now because いる is acting as the “head”, we make changes to いる - if we want to be polite we turn いる iru into います imasu to get 走っています, If we want to put this running in the past, we say 走っていた hashitte-ita.
Now how about the other way around - what if we want to single out a mouse which is already running and say that it’s cute?
- running mouse is cute - 走っているネズミがかわいい。hashitte-iru nezumi ga kawaii
We swap them over. That’s how you stick verbs and verb-like adjectives to a noun - put them plain form then just stick them straight on. Now hopefully you can see why these verb-like adjectives are verb-like - they behave a lot like verbs.
And just like before…
- running mouse… - 走っているネズミ… hashitte-iru nezumi…
…everything leads up to the head.
Now, what if this mouse is hungry…
- cute mouse is eating bread - かわいいネズミがパンを食べている。kawaii nezumi ga pan wo tabete-iru
“Bread” doesn’t come at the end in Japanese because verbs are the “head” of sentences. Everything leads up to the head in that bit of the sentence. In polite form, we change the いる to います because it’s at the end of the whole sentence in the predicate position. We don’t change かわいい because it’s an attributive and has to stay in plain form.
So, what if the mouse isn’t just cute but funny - 面白い
- the interesting and cute mouse is eating bread - 面白くてかわいいネズミがパンを食べている。omoshirokute kawaii nezumi ga pan wo tabete-iru
Here we put 面白い into it’s て-form (continuative form) to grammatically indicate “this but also another thing”.
- cute mouse is eating bread - かわいいネズミがパンを食べています。kawaii nezumi ga pan wo tabete-imasu
Now, what if we want to say…
- the mouse that is eating bread is cute - パンを食べているネズミがかわいい。pan wo tabete-iru nezumi ga kawaii
If it’s not immediately clear: you use the “head final” structure to back up entire attributive sentences onto a noun in Japanese, with the verb in plain form.
Can we て? Maaaaaybe?
- the mouse that is running and eating bread is cute - 走っていってパンを食べているネズミがかわいい。hashitte-itte pan wo tabete-iru nezumi ga kawaii
Notice how we stack up the て for “hashitte-itte” since いる iru is carrying that final “head” position. This is stretching the boundaries of natural sentences a bit but sure, て all the things.
So what about nouns and noun-like adjectives? Let’s start with predicates…
- it’s a mouse- ねずみだ。nezumi da
Or in polite form…
- it’s a mouse (and I’m being polite) - ネズミです。nezumi desu
です is the polite form of だ equivalent to verbs which end in ます. Here it’s much more like “it’s”.
Where does this です even come from? It’s a contraction of であります - the plain form of あります is ある, so the plain form of です is である. である is used a lot where you might expect だ or です in formal/scholarly/officious situations like dictionary definitions or legal documents. Hopefully it is easy to understand how である and であります are the same idea at different levels of politeness.
And the で before である and ではありません is just the て-form of だ.
- it’s a mouse (and I’m writing a dictionary definition or contract in which this is some kind of stipulation) - ネズミである。nezumi de-aru
Noun-like adjectives follow the same pattern as nouns…
- it’s quiet - 静かだ。shizuka da
And again, for politeness…
- it’s quiet (and I’m being polite) 静かです。shizuka desu
The thing to note here is that both nouns and noun-like verbs both need the help of だ (or です) to be predicates, because unlike verbs and verb-like adjectives they can’t be the heads of a sentence without that stub.
Onto attributives, and here we’re just talking about a noun phrase where the noun is the head…
- a quiet mouse… - 静かなネズミ… shizukana nezumi…
To be the attribute of a noun, a noun-like adjective needs help from な. Which sounds an awful lot like だ, doesn’t it? (Some people liken な to a sticky attributive version of だ.)
Nouns can stick to things too. You may already know about の.
- a cat’s mouse… - ネコのネズミ… neko no nezumi
- it is the cat’s mouse - ネコのネズミだ。neko no nezumi da
- it is the cat’s mouse (and I’m being polite) - ネコのネズミです。neko no nezumi desu
Particles can also form their own phrases as part of a sentence, and again in Japanese we know that words lead up to the head. Some particles are what Japanese uses to express ideas like “from”, “to”, “until”, “especially”…
- from/because of the mouse - ネズミから… nezumi kara
And because a particle phrase needs to live in a sentence and phrases in Japanese lead up to their head, we get this.
- i/we/you left because of the mouse - ネズミから出た。nezumi kara deta
- i/we/you left because of the mouse (and I’m being polite) - ネズミから出ました。nezumi kara demashita
Oh, another sentence… say, can we do that thing from before even if it’s in the past tense?
- it’s the person who left because of the mouse - ネズミから出た人だ。nezumi kara deta hito da
If we use the plain past verb we can absolutely do that thing from before. But what if it’s past tense?
- it was the cute person who left because of the mouse - ネズミから出た人だった。nezumi kara deta hito datta
だった is the past form of だ if that’s not clear. But what if the person was cute? We have to put cute in the past tense too with -かった -katta
- it was the cute person who left because of the mouse - ネズミから出てかわいかった人だった。nezumi kara dete kawaikatta hito datta
Or what if everything was cute.
- i wonder if it was the cute person who ran around in a cute way because of the cute mouse… - かわいかったネズミからかわいく走り回っていた人だったかな。kawaikatta nezumi kara kawaiku hashrimawatte-ita hito datta kana…
Wait, かな isn’t the head? No. It’s a “sentence-tag” particle, not a head, and that’s the big exception to an otherwise steadfast pattern of everything leads up to the head.
Hopefully you can see from all these examples the sheer consistency of head-final phrases in Japanese and have a sense for how embedding these phrases within one another works - . Beyond that, being proficient with Japanese grammar is being able to see how one class of word sticks to another class of word - especially where particles are concerned - and knowing the difference between “sticky” attributive forms and “end of sentence” predicate forms.
I have left a lot out of this explanation and glossed over a ton of detail in order to keep the focus firmly on head-finality, but hopefully the head-finality bit is now as demystified as it can be.
Good luck!