You are free to use western linguistic terms. No need to attack others while claiming to be unable to understand their motivation.
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I didn’t attack anyone. I simply asked if they apply the same logic of ‘self move’ and ‘other move’ to every other Japanese linguistic term and if not, why not. Do you use ‘description verb’ or ‘na-adjective’ for a 形容動詞? If you don’t use the former but you would use ‘self move verb’ why the inconsistency? That was all I was asking.
I’m sorry, but that does not sound like a good faith inquiry.
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That’s fine. You can believe whatever you feel.
Right, I think I understand what you mean now. Apologies, I was also imprecise.
What I meant earlier was that the English translation of the word can be interpreted as transitive even if the verb in Japanese is an intransitive verb, still being consistent with what transitivity itself in general means.
I agree it’s a little inconsistent. I don’t know whether the concept of な and の and い adjectives is taught the same way in Japanese schools. I think Leebo or someone else might have a better idea. I only found this Wiki page about adjectives which goes into extra detail: Japanese adjectives - Wikipedia
To me calling adjectival nouns な or の adjectives is a bit of a cop-out, but I haven’t heard anyone sticking to the term adjectival noun in any learning resources strictly.
@Kinozato big apologies for derailing your thread! 
It always ends like that when intransitive/transitive verbs are even mentioned.
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The term 形容動詞 gave me some trouble indeed (one of my french japanese dictionaries choose to avoid the problem and just use “keiyodoshi”).
Finally i conciliated it by thinking of it not as a 形容的動詞 but as a形容詞 that requires a 動詞 (contrary to real 形容詞 that can make a sentence by themselves)
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With all due respect, and with a quick disclosure to make it clear where I stand – I’m not a big Cure Dolly fan, even if some of her explanations are intuitive, and I like using standard/common terms unless they’re so technical they’re meaningless for most people – it’s not true that the definition of 他動詞 and ‘transitive verb’ are the same in English and Japanese. I’ve been using monolingual dictionaries for a long time at this point, and this difference in the understanding of transitivity struck me very early on.
If you check Oxford, the English definition involves taking a ‘direct object’. The Japanese definition from 大辞林 roughly translates as ‘a verb whose effect/action reaches something else’. If we applied the English definition to Japanese, particularly if we relied on the intuitive idea that を is a direct object marker, verbs like 上回る would be transitive (and their English counterparts, like ‘exceed’, certainly are). However, in Japanese, 上回る is a 自動詞, because what’s marked by を is simply a standard for comparison, whereas the action the verb describes only affects the doer, not the thing exceeded. I think that ‘self-move’ and ‘other-move’ sound clunky, and that ending each word with ‘moving’, at the least, would be quite an improvement, but regardless, my experience leads me to think that it’s important to know that Japanese and English don’t understand transitivity in exactly the same way, even if big chunks of those two understandings overlap nicely.
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Umm, ‘universally-known’ is rather an overstatement, wouldn’t you say? I doubt most lay people are familiar with even 10% of the jargon that floats around in academic linguistics. Even something quite common like transitive/intransitive is probably not a familiar term for say (just guessing off the top of my head) 50% of the general population.
But even before that objection: First of all, prior to the widespread study of linguistics in English (which has come to be the world’s lingua franca (somewhat ironically)), I’m pretty sure the Japanese would have used their own words to describe their own language (just a wild guess). And while I don’t know enough about the origins of Japanese to say what words were used when, the Japanese do currently use the words 自動詞 (jidoushi) and 他動詞 (tadoushi) to describe words for which the subject is ‘self-moving’ or ‘other-moving’.
In the video Cure Dolly gives the example of 従う (したがう) meaning ‘to obey’, which is listed in Jisho (したがう - Jisho.org) as an ‘intransitive’ verb, even though the English equivalent is transitive. See, for example, this primary definition which illustrates that, taken at face value, it actually is a transitive word in Japanese:
- to obey (an order, law, etc.); to abide by (a rule, custom, etc.); to follow; to observe; to conform to; to yield to
But it is also a 自動詞, and hence that is why it is ‘translated’ as an ‘intransitive’ verb in Jisho, even when functionally speaking, it is not – because ‘self-moving’ and ‘other-moving’ are not typical distinctions made in most Western languages, so some time in the past Western linguists mapped 自動詞 to ‘intransitive’ and 他動詞 to ‘transitive’, because those were similar concepts which they already were familiar with, even though it’s not a perfect mapping. However, when considering the ‘hyperliteral’ meaning as ‘self-move’ versus ‘other-move’, it makes perfect sense: One obeys another person (transitive), but the one doing the obeying is oneself (自動詞).
Just because the linguistics terminology might (currently) be considered ‘universal’ (and actually I doubt that, unless linguistics is a dead subject with no active scholarly research and debate), that doesn’t mean that every language in existence must conform to those prescribed concepts/definitions. If Japanese functions in such a way that their distinction between 自動詞 and 他動詞 is meaningful within Japanese itself, then who are we to argue? It is what it is.
Personally – and this is solely just my own opinion on the matter, not meant to be persuasive to anyone else but me; just a little ‘aside’ – I like how Japanese is a little bit (sometimes quite a lot) different than Western languages. It’s interesting. It’s fun. I’d like to learn more about how/what it is rather than trying to fit everything into some pre-existing conceptual framework developed largely because of the historical accident that the modern study of linguistics flourished most in Western countries, where Western languages all have a lot of similarities with each other that don’t necessarily map directly onto other languages of the world.
Before I move on, I want to mention that: Second of all, if transitivity is such a universally understood topic, then why such confusion over it when it comes to how Western sources try to teach Japanese? Could it possibly be the case that there are subtle differences between the way Japanese works as a language, and how Western languages typically work? 
Hyperliteral? Hmm, let’s see:
- 自動 - automatic
- 自動車 - automobile
- 自動販売機 - automatic vending machine
- 自動化 - automation
Meanwhile:
- automatic - having the capability of starting, operating, moving, etc., independently
In other words, ‘self-moving’, as opposed to ‘not taking an object in a sentence’. I think a more accurate descriptor would be ‘literal’ rather than ‘hyperliteral’.
I also doubt if ‘na-adjective’ is a universally-known linguistics term. 
But to answer your question, I have indeed added 形容動詞 to my SRS queue (on a different site) when I first discovered that it’s quite different than a Western-style adjective, and indeed I also learned it on WK at around level 21 a while back, before I reset from level 28 down to level 7, and I did indeed use the WK vocab (along with 形容詞 and 動詞) as a way of learning that it can combine aspects of both adjectives and verbs. Indeed, it can be said to be neither an adjective nor a verb, but actually a noun(!), as described in this snippet from Wikipedia (Adjectival noun (Japanese) - Wikipedia):
In fact, by some analyses, nouns and na-nominals are fundamentally grammatically the same, where 〜の vs. 〜な when used attributively is simply a conventional stylistic complementary distribution, with 〜の／〜な being allomorphs. This view is reinforced by the fact that some words, such as 特別 tokubetsu “special”, can take either a 〜の or a 〜な, depending on the phrase.[1] Ultimately, 〜な is an abbreviation of 〜にある, used to use a noun attributively (compare modern 〜である, which is a more recent form), while 〜の is the genitive case;[1] see etymology, below.
It’s when it’s combined with a copula (e.g. da or desu) or with na itself (which as shown above is originally an abbreviation of a verb) that it takes on its ‘descriptive verb’ aspects. Quite an interesting and useful thing to know!
Huh! Who would have thought that looking into the ‘hyperliteral’ meanings of Japanese words (in particular their etymologies/origins), especially in relation to Japanese itself, could shed such light on otherwise arbitrary-seeming conventions, and actually make learning Japanese more logical and even fun! Who ever would have thought?!?! 
I do? Really? Are you sure of that? Heck, I often make up words-that-don’t-exist-yet-or-at-least-I’m-not-aware-of-them all the time when I’m trying to explain something to someone else. As long as myself and the other person ‘get’ what exactly it is that I’m talking about, what’s the problem?
In fact, I would suggest that approaching language more flexibly, as a way to convey intended meaning/feeling rather than as some strict and/or judgmental system (“You’re not conveying your meaning in The Correct™ way, even though the other person understands you just fine!”) is actually a very useful approach. Don’t knock it till ya try it, as they say.
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Just to throw in that “transitive” is an overloaded word in English. English speakers with a scientific or mathematics background will almost certainly have heard of “transitive” from set theory.
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You were much more helpful than I was 
Did you read the post above yours?
There is a pattern. Whether the base verb is transitive or intransitive to begin with just depends on the language. English has it one way for one idea of a verb, other languages have it the same or other ways.
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Yeah, in my Japanese Linguistics classes, we used the English linguistics terms rather than the Japanese and that’s how the textbooks were too. Na-adjectives have a name like denominal adjectives I think though? I can’t easily check my notes rn though, sorry.
When I was first reading this thread, I thought YukiPhoenix’s arguments for using the “transitive”/“intransitive” terminology made more sense, because there didn’t seem to be a reason to treat the Japanese terms 自動詞 and 他動詞 any differently. However, after reading Jonapedia’s comment, the motivation made a lot more sense.
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned this here yet (and I’m probably not the best person to mention it, given that I’m not a linguist), but perhaps the motivation for a difference in terminology also comes from the fact that Japanese is more of a topic-prominent language than a subject-prominent one, like English. Just my two cents, though, since I don’t really know much about these things.
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I think this may be the source of the some of the trouble here. There is transitivity as applied to English and transitivity as a linguistics term. The Oxford definition is probably only focused on the former and not as specific as the latter. When we discussed transitivity in my Japanese Linguistic class, we specifically focused on the valency of verbs. Valency is the number of arguments a verb takes/requires. In English, you really only have 3 required types- subject, direct object, and indirect object. As you state, Japanese doesn’t limit higher valency to only direct objects and that there can be other arguments. We studied 8 or so arguments and adjuncts in class, although I could probably only list half by heart and probably not with the proper terminology at this moment.
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Honestly, as it’s already been said, people should for the most part use what makes sense to them and if that’s the Japanese terms, then great. 
It definitely took me a couple of weeks and a lot of reading to understand how to apply the linguistics terminology and clearly 3-5 years later, it hasn’t stuck with me perfectly. In that time though, I’ve started learning how to use Japanese and what I do remember has been fairly helpful. I use it because I’ve got the background and it’s nice to get practical use out of theoretical stuff I learned before. That doesn’t make it a perfect fit for everyone else of course.
People should use whatever facilitates their learning best. I just find it interesting when stumbling across threads like this where it feels like people want to reinvent the wheel or dislike a fairly standard pattern of language in Japanese because they don’t know it’s a pattern.
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To be fair, it just so happened that we had posted within about 1 minute of each other, IIRC, and considering my post was quite long anyway, I’m sure they didn’t have a chance to read it first.
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My bad, I should’ve checked the timestamps. Well hopefully that pings them to check it out though.
It’s interesting to know that there are other definitions of transitivity, and yes, I did feel as though what Oxford had proposed seemed rather limited. The question is though… so what makes a Japanese verb transitive or intransitive? The Wikipedia page discussing transitivity uses terms like ‘ditransitive’ and ‘tritransitive’ depending on the number of objects. Would the idea then be that some of the arguments taken by Japanese verbs are not objects? In any case, what I said was essentially meant to point out that the meaning of ‘transitive’ in common usage for English (and many other European languages) doesn’t line up with how it’s often used in Japanese, particularly since beginners in Japanese tend to be taught that を is an object marker before learning what else it can do.
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I agree and I was kinda surprised that Oxford didn’t have more definitions of it.
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the transitivity Wikipedia page, so that’s why I didn’t link it. Arguments are the parts required for a verb to be considered grammatically correct. Implied is fine though. Like 歌う the subject is I (at least in this example). I can’t remember an exact example and I know even if I had my notes, I probably didn’t write it down. I do feel like my professor gave an example where time (maybe in the form of an amount of time) was an argument and not an adjunct. We definitely discussed in class though about various arguments.
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You mean when using かかる to express time passage and things “taking” time?
Is this related to verbs that do “swapping” like 取り違える or the various exchange verbs?
From a broader perspective thanks to Japanese I started re-evaluating how English handles grammar and it does have a lot of the language tools Japanese also possesses, but I can’t remember ever English being dissected (in my classes) as much as Japanese usually is. There are conditionals, relative clauses, etc., but I don’t think anyone taught us about transitivity.
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