Fair point, but all of us were forced to think about the grammar of our own languages in primary school. Since this is a thread about diagramming syntax, I don’t think we can avoid thinking about verbs, adjectives and the like.
Everyday schoolchildren take classes in 国語 and English, in their own native languages. It’s not just linguists that use these terms.
Exactly.
The rules for diagramming English sentences came about due to how we think about our own language.
I’m pretty sure the “parts-of-speech” diagram above is an example of how Japanese teach their own language syntax. It comes from Japanese instruction about their own language.
I’d prefer to avoid any terms that aren’t used by Japanese natives to describe their own language. If any are in the prior posts, let’s remove them.
Diagramming Japanese sentences
I’d like to create diagramming rules that are (mostly) as consistent as possible with how Japanese think about their own language rather than attempting to bend western terms to fit.
I actually think the three of us are pretty close to agreement.
用言 (“declinable word”) vs. 動詞 (“verb”)
Apologies. I used 動詞 as the category for three parts of speech when I should have used 用言 previously. This caused unnecessary confusion and muddied my point.
I’m contending that Japanese natives tend to teach schoolchildren that 形容動詞 are primarily “だ-verbs” (actually だ用言) rather than “な-adjectives”. To them, the normal usage is to end a sentence (as the action/existence/state part in a preposition). That they can also modify nouns by replacing the だ with な is an alternate use to them, not the primary.
We tend to think of it the other way around.
Similarly, I’m contending that they tend to think of 形容詞 primarily as “い-verbs” (い用言) and only secondarily as adjectives that can modify nouns, while we tend to think of it the other way around.
My evidence for this contention are the labels 終止形の語尾がイ for 形容詞 and 終止形の語尾がダ for 形容動詞 in the parts-of-speech diagram (as well as other native instruction material I’ve seen).
Predicate-centric vs. subject-centric and tokenization
I believe Japanese natives tend to think “predicate-centrically” (verb-centric) and we tend to think “subject-centrically” (noun-centric). Both consider subjects (主語) to be the “master” of a sentence, the “doer”, but we place more emphasis on what (subjects and object), while they place more on what’s happening (verbs). Witness our confusion at “subject-less” Japanese sentences!
Further, I don’t think English adjectives can ever act as the action in a predicate, so 形容詞 and 形容動詞 seem especially weird to us.
Take the the equivalent sentences
It is red / それが赤い
and
It is quiet / それが静かだ
We consider “is” to be the verb, the critical part of the predicate, in both sentences.
They consider 赤い or 静かだ to be the 用言, the 活用のあるもの, the 単独で述語となるもの (the single “declinable” word that becomes the predicate). To them “is-red” and “is-quiet” are each a SINGLE, freestanding, indivisible part of speech.
Yet we teach Western learners of Japanese that 赤い and 静か (without the だ!) are adjectives primarily, and it’s only a special case that allows them to end a sentence. We further encourage (intentionally or not) thinking about だ as though it were equivalent to “is”.
I believe Japanese schoolchildren are taught that if you want to use 形容動詞 to further describe a 名詞, you replace the だ with な. Foreign learners are taught the other way around because we are noun (and thus adjective) centric thinkers.
Absolutely.
Both languages have ways to use one type of thing as another. I’m just trying to point out that Japanese tend to “think in the other direction” when converting between verb-like and adjective-like behavior.
The ability to convert one type of 用言 into another doesn’t invalidate that point.