Please help me create Japanese _sentence_ diagrams for beginners

I changed the transitive/intransitive example to 閉まる・閉める (because the English equivalent is a little easier to grasp, at least for me).

I’m unsure because of the weirdness with 形容詞(けいようし).

Both are 赤い is 形容詞(けいようし) and can form the entire predicate: 「水が赤い」

Both describe 赤い describes a state when used that way. I think that might mean it can be considered 状態動詞.

(Whoops. 好き appears to be 形容動詞(けいようどうし) — it requires the だ)

I would have gone with 上がる・上げる since the split carries across to english (rise/raise).

the ambiguity doesn’t exist in japanese. 動詞 in japanese grammar are well defined as what you got taught as “verbs”. they’re distinct from 形容詞 by definition.

Much better. Will correct.

Note that the parts-of-speech diagram puts both in the “freestanding, inflectable” category. They are distinct, but 動詞(どうし), 形容詞(けいようし), and 形容動詞(けいようどうし) are all in the same bucket.

From a Japanese grammatical standpoint, the distinction appears to be purely between action and state.

The confusion comes because we tend to think of things like だ・です as verbs and 形容詞(けいようし)形容動詞(けいようどうし) as adjectives. I believe to a Japanese native they all do something and are closer to verbs.

The term 形容動詞(けいようどうし) (“na-adjective”) also has the characters 動詞(どうし) in it. We don’t consider them “verbs” but Japanese natives most definitely consider them 動詞(どうし).

I think 状態動詞 means 形容動詞 and 形容詞, but excludes 動詞!

This is a really interesting point that would be near impossible to explain without using the Japanese grammatical terms!


By the way, I find it fascinating that we generally call them “na-adjectives” but Japanese call them “form-type verbs” and describe them as ending in da ( 終止形(しゅうしけい)語尾(ごび)がダ)!

the distinction is entirely syntactic.

crudely[1], 動詞 end with the う + the copulas, 形容詞 end with い and 形容動詞 require a 動詞 to inflect (usually だ/な)[2].

I’d say it’s more likely they don’t consider them at all in this sense. but if they did they’d probably be nouns

they’re a subcategory of 動詞. weblio gives the following examples:

「ある」「いる」「足りる」「違う」「似る」「痛む」「ヒリヒリする」「見える」「思う」可能動詞補助動詞としての「過ぎる」

they’re clearly semantically very similar to adjectives though


  1. it’s also based on how they inflect but I don’t want to research and write an essay ↩︎

  2. etymologically, these started out as nouns, and most of them still are ↩︎

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I’m not sure I understand.

Do you mean Japanese natives don’t consider 形容動詞 a type of 状態動詞?

Or do you mean that Japanese natives don’t consider 形容詞 a type of 状態動詞?

Or both?

The weblio page seems to distinguish between 存在動詞(そんざいどうし) and 状態動詞. That appears to be precisely the first branch after “inflectable” in the parts-of speech diagram. This seems consistent with the point I’m trying to make.

Ending a sentence with 形容詞 seemed like a strange special case to me for a long time, but this taxonomy has made it much more understandable for me.

Note that weblio is just re-presenting the wikipedia article on the topic.

I think the average Japanese native doesn’t think about verbs or adjectives at all, any more than the average English speaking native.

I also think that you are running into the fact that there are multiple ways of looking at the language and some of these terms come specifically from one of them (western-language grammar, translated into Japanese) whereas your diagram comes from another.

I mean that except for linguists they’ve probably never needed the distinction

it gives 存在動詞 as a subcategory of 状態動詞

incidentally, if you ever wondered what happens with the 〜ている form, you’re using いる to turn a regular 動詞 (action) into a 状態動詞 (state).

e.g. 死ぬ (action of dying) to 死んでいる (the state of being death)

yeah just noticed that…it’s still correct though…

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.[1]

I actually think the three of us are pretty close to agreement.

用言(ようげん) (“declinable word”) vs. 動詞(どうし) (“verb”)

Apologies. I used 動詞 as the category for three parts of speech when I should have used 用言(ようげん) 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(ようげん)) rather than “な-adjectives”.[2] 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(ようげん)) 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(しゅうしけい)語尾(ごび)がイ for 形容詞 and 終止形(しゅうしけい)語尾(ごび)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[3], 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 (あか)い or 静かだ to be the 用言(ようげん), the 活用(かつよう)のあるもの, the 単独(たんどく)述語(じゅつご)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(ようげん) into another doesn’t invalidate that point.


  1. The target audience is English-speaking learners of the language, though, so differences in how we think about things should be highlighted, and some concessions will likely be necessary. ↩︎

  2. Like us, they also tend to conflate terms (e.g. verb vs. predicate). The 動詞 in 形容動詞 is confusing. I think we can all agree that they are a form of 用言, even though they are not canonically 動詞. ↩︎

  3. Not a linguist! I could be wrong. ↩︎

Rrwrex, you would be probably interested in this YouTube playlist, it’s a course of 国語文法 for 中学校

The part on 形容動詞 is here:

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Holy cats, yes!!

Thank you!

Only one caveat: I do a lot of learning on a whole lot of topics via youtube videos.

They are terrific for learning darn near antything, but written documentation tends to be much better for quickly getting back to (or referring others to) a specific point. It’s also a lot harder to just “hit play” and let stuff wash over you — eventually you have to go back and reread when it stops making sense! :laughing:


Just listened to the first bit of part 1, and it seems to confirm my contention that all three (動詞(どうし)形容詞(けいよし)形容動詞(けいようどうし)) are taught together as SINGLE , freestanding, indivisible parts of speech that impart a use/action/whatever (活用(かつよう)).

just to clarify, is what you mean by this “how japanese linguists analyse their language”, and by extension, “how japanese grammar is taught to japanese people”?

one issue here is that many of the terms come directly from western linguistics anyway[1]. throwing them out is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. like it or not, there’s an unavoidable western lense on the study of japanese grammar. this is why I find cure dolly’s rhetoric on grammar terms quite misleading and I think it mostly shows that she doesn’t understand what the terms mean.

the other issue is that grammar analysis is distinct from language usage and how people have internalised the language. conflating them isn’t necessarily helpful.

I think in this case it’s more useful to look at the headwords used in the dictionary. 活用動詞 are listed in their bare uninflected forms, and most of them are nouns as well (afaik, all of them are etymologically nouns with a verb stuck on the end, but the noun usage for some of them has been lost).

the distinction between 名詞 and 形容動詞 in japanese is very weak, both semantically and syntactically.

I think this is going to be hard to justify…

I think you’re abusing the word action here.

赤い isn’t an action anymore than “is red” is an action.

also, it might just be because I’m bilingual english/turkish but i don’t think there’s anything weird or confusing about dropping the subject or an adjective predicating a sentence. i don’t think it particularly emphasises anything either :person_shrugging:

I also don’t think I learned the な form of 形容動詞 first. i learned them together in the same lesson so there’s not really a “primarily” in that sense either. I’m not sure how school children get taught, but they’re all capable of using 形容動詞 long before they learn the grammar behind them, so again, I couldn’t say what they “primarily” think of them as being.

do we? I can’t remember what I was taught in school. I tend to just think of them as “describing words” without really any thought about syntax unless I really have to. in which case I don’t give any particular sentence position priority :sweat_smile:

I mean, they consider だ to be a 助動詞 and we use “to be” as an auxiliary verb in conjugation all the time (e.g. he is going), so we’re not that far off…

additionally, I really don’t think they think of 形容動詞 as a single indivisible part of speech. it seems very unlikely given how they use the language. you’re basically never going to hear someone say 静かだ or any other 形容動詞+だ. you’ll get a です if it’s polite, but in casual speech, it’s just 静か. the だ is emphatic to the point of rude so they’ll usually drop it entirely. plus see my point about nouns and headwords.

this is new to me. sounds like a problem with whatever resource you started learning with (granted my route to learning japanese has been pretty non-standard).

couple of written resources:

http://国語文法.com/


  1. e.g. I know 主題 is, and apparently it was historically a point of contention amongst japanese scholars whether it even existed in japanese. I’m not sure, but I think 自動詞 and 他動詞 are also direct translations given that they’re defined almost identically to (in)transitive verbs, give or take the meaning of 動詞 ↩︎

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No, as it happens. The UK school curriculum when I went through it was not very big on teaching English grammar. Typically the first exposure you got to terms like ‘verb’ and ‘noun’ was through learning French in secondary school. For your native language there really is no need to teach formal grammar, though a lot of education systems do it anyway.

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This seemed difficult to believe (unless children in the UK emerge from the womb able to compose complex thoughts in their native language — which might explain a lot, actually).

Officially, you were supposed to be taught English grammar beginning around age 11. Note that English is the first subject listed in KS1 and KS2:

why? most native speakers of any language learn to compose complex sentences well before understanding the grammar (assuming they ever learn it).

for instance, I’m fluent in turkish but I’ve never been taught the grammar. I just learnt it by immersion.

besides, how do you think people spoke to each other before systemised schooling? studying grammar is a very very modern thing compared to how long humans have been capable of speech

that curriculum is regularly updated…I think it’s changed at least three times since I was at that age, so it’s possible this wasn’t the case when @pm215 was at that age

If I was a beginner in Japanese and seeing these hell crazy diagrams I would have quit Japanese studies right away :rofl:

Thank you. These are helpful.

The first seems to immediately provide further evidence for my contention above:

That middle section on 用言 jibes exactly with the top of the parts of speech diagram and backs my contention that Japanese are taught to think of 動詞、形容詞、形容動詞 as similar, related things, and that they prioritize them higher than noun-like things.

Are you really so certain that you aren’t? I’ve been studying the language off and on since 1975 and still consider myself a beginner. Though I’ve learned a few things.

I can’t believe I’m having to argue that schoolchildren are taught about their own languages in primary school.

But I will limit myself to what I know firsthand: American schoolchildren study English, and Japanese study 国語. Grammar / 文法 is an important part of both.

but that’s not what you’re arguing (and it’s not what we’ve been arguing against).

I’ll quote the statement I was responding to again:

and the main point of my argument:

none of that is incompatible with being taught grammar at school.

furthermore, the grammar you get taught at school doesn’t really say anything about how you internally think about and use language. cognitive linguistics would be a lot easier if it did…

That’s what I thought I was arguing…

You are now making a new point that one doesn’t need to learn grammar to speak a language “fluently”:

This seems extraneous to the undeniable fact that many schoolchildren are taught grammar.

Why do (some? most?) countries teach their children grammar?

Are you suggesting it’s not worthwhile?

And how fluent are you in Turkish? (That’s a joke, like “How long is a piece of string?”)

I dunno. it’s certainly useful if you need to reason about your language, and for learning another language though.

after spending a few weeks there, people can’t tell I that I wasn’t born there and haven’t lived there all my life

oh man this is an awkward sentence

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I really did mean it as a joke. The word “fluent” on its own means different things to different people. Like “a piece of string” it needs more information to quantify.

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