Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.
In language typology, it has many features different from most European languages.
Distinctive aspects of modern Japanese sentence structure
Word order: head-final and left-branching The modern theory of constituent order ("word order"), usually attributed to Joseph Harold Greenberg, identifies several kinds of phrases. Each one has a head and possibly a modifier. The head of a phrase either precedes its modifier (head-initial) or follows it (head-final). Some of these phrase types, with the head marked in boldface, are: genitive phrase, i.e., noun modified by another noun ("the cover of the book", "the book's cover"); noun governed by an adposition ("on the table", "underneath the table"); comparison ("[X is] bigger than Y", i.e., "compared to Y, X is big"). noun modified by an adjective ("black cat").
Some languages are inconsistent in constituent order, having a mixture of head-initial phrase types and head-final phrase types. Looking at the preceding list, English for example is mostly head-initial, but nouns follow the adjectives which modify them. Moreover, genitive phrases can be either head-initial or head-final in English. By contrast, the Japanese language is consistently head-final: genitive phrase:
noun governed by an adposition:
comparison:
noun modified by an adjective:
Head-finality in Japanese sentence structure carries over to the building of sentences using other sentences. In sentences that have other sentences as constituents, the subordinated sentences (relative clauses, for example), always precede what they refer to, since they are modifiers and what they modify has the syntactic status of phrasal head. Translating the phrase "the man who was walking down the street" into Japanese word order would be "street down walking was man".
Head-finality prevails also when sentences are coordinated instead of subordinated. In the world's languages, it is common to avoid repetition between coordinated clauses by optionally deleting a constituent common to the two parts, as in "Bob bought his mother some flowers and his father a tie", where the second bought is omitted. In Japanese, such "gapping" must proceed in the reverse order: "Bob mother for some flowers and father for tie bought". The reason for this is that in Japanese, sentences (other than occasional inverted sentences or sentences containing afterthoughts) always end in a verb (or other predicative words like adjectival verbs, adjectival nouns, auxiliary verbs)—the only exceptions being a few sentence-ending particles such as , , and . The particle turns a statement into a question, while the others express the speaker's attitude towards the statement.
Word class system Japanese has five major lexical word classes:
verbal nouns (correspond to English gerunds like 'studying', 'jumping', which denote activities) (names vary, also called -adjectives or "nominal adjectives")
(so-called -adjectives) More broadly, there are two classes: uninflectable (nouns, including verbal nouns and adjectival nouns) and inflectable (verbs, with adjectives as defective verbs). To be precise, a verbal noun is simply a noun to which the light verb can be appended, while an adjectival noun is like a noun but uses instead of when acting attributively. Adjectives (-adjectives) inflect identically to the negative form of verbs, which end in . Compare → and → .
Some scholars, such as Eleanor Harz Jorden, refer to adjectives instead as adjectivals, since they are grammatically distinct from adjectives: they can predicate a sentence. That is, is glossed as "hot" when modifying a noun phrase, as in , but as "is hot" when predicating, as in .
Open and closed classes
The two inflected classes, verb and adjective, are historically considered closed classes, meaning they do not readily gain new members—but see the following paragraphs. Instead, new and borrowed verbs and adjectives are typically conjugated periphrastically as verbal noun + (e.g. ) and adjectival noun + . This differs from Indo-European languages, where verbs and adjectives are open classes, though analogous "do" constructions exist, including English "do a favor", "do the twist" or French "faire un footing" (do a "footing", go for a jog), and periphrastic constructions are common for other senses, like "try climbing" (verbal noun) or "try parkour" (noun). Other languages where verbs are a closed class include Basque: very few Basque verbs (albeits very common ones) have synthetic conjugation, all the others are only formed periphrastically. Conversely, pronouns are closed classes in Western languages but open classes in Japanese and some other East Asian languages.
In a few cases historically, and much more commonly recently, new verbs are created by appending the suffix to a noun or using it to replace the end of a word. This is most often, but not exclusively, done with borrowed words, and results in a word written in a mixture of katakana (stem) and hiragana (inflectional ending), which is otherwise very rare. This is typically casual, with the most well-established example being (circa 1920), from , with other common examples including , from , and from . In cases where the borrowed word already ends with or even contains a or , this may be rebracketed as a verb ending and changed to a , as in , from ; , from ; and , from . New verbs coined in this fashion are uniformly group 1 verbs and, at least in the Tokyo accent, consistently are stressed immediately before the final る.
New adjectives are extremely rare; one example is , from adjectival noun , and a more casual recent example is , by contraction of .Languages with different open and closed word classes By contrast, in Old Japanese adjectives (precursors of present -adjectives ending in , formerly a different word class) were open, as reflected in words like , from the adjective , and , from the noun (with sound change). Japanese adjectives are unusual in being closed class but quite numerous – about 700 adjectives – while most languages with closed class adjectives have very few.The Typology of Adjectival Predication, Harrie Wetzer, p. 311The Art of Grammar: A Practical Guide, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, p. 96 Some believe this is due to a grammatical change of inflection from an aspect system to a tense system, with adjectives predating the change.
The conjugation of -adjectives has similarities to the conjugation of verbs, unlike Western languages where inflection of adjectives, where it exists, is more likely to have similarities to the declension of nouns. Verbs and adjectives being closely related is unusual from the perspective of English, but is a common case across languages generally, and one may consider Japanese adjectives as a kind of stative verb.
Japanese vocabulary has a large layer of Chinese loanwords, including those borrowed in ancient times as well as modern Sino-Japanese coinages (wasei kango), yet virtually none of them are verbs or "-adjectives" – they are all nouns, of which some are verbal nouns () and some are adjectival nouns (). In addition to the basic verbal noun + form, verbal nouns with a single-character root often experienced sound changes, such as → (rendaku) → , as in , and some cases where the stem underwent sound change, as in , from .
Verbal nouns are uncontroversially nouns, having only minor syntactic differences to distinguish them from pure nouns like 'mountain'. There are some minor distinctions within verbal nouns, most notably that some primarily conjugate as (with a particle), more like nouns, while others primarily conjugate as , and others are common either way. For example, is much more common than , while is much more common than . Adjectival nouns have more syntactic differences versus pure nouns, and traditionally were considered more separate, but they, too, are ultimately a subcategory of nouns.
There are a few minor word classes that are related to adjectival nouns, namely the adjectives and adjectives. Of these, adjectives are fossils of earlier forms of adjectives (the adjectives of Old Japanese), and are typically classed separately, while adjectives are a parallel class (formerly adjectives in Late Old Japanese), but are typically classed with adjectives.
Different classifications The first structured description of the Japanese was in , an 1831 grammar by Tsurumine Shigenobu. It was based on earlier Dutch grammars such as Shizuki Tadao's and . The words hinshi and shihin also came about from these early late-Edo and early-Meiji grammars. Since then, there have been multiple conflicting classifications of the parts of speech of Japanese. GrammarianYearCountTsurumine Shigenobu1831Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture1872eight parts of speechTanaka Yoshikado18741877Nakane Kiyoshi1876Yasuda Keisai1877Hori Hidenari1877three parts of speechNakajima Misao1879Ōya Tōru18801899seven parts of speechBasil Hall Chamberlain1887Ōtsuki Fumihiko18891897Ochiai Naobumi1890nine parts of speech1893nine parts of speech189518971915twelve parts of speechTejima Haruji18901899Takada Utarō1899Ōwada Takeki18911901Takatsu Kuwasaburō1891ten parts of speechOkakura Yoshisaburō1891nine parts of speechHayama Hisanori1891Hirata Moritane1893eight parts of speechShinbo Iwaji1896Shiratori Kikuji1893nine parts of speech1898Matsushita Daizaburō1898190119241928Morishita Matsue1900Matsudaira Shizuka19001908ten parts of speechMitsuchi Chūzō1901Kanai Yasuzō1901ten parts of speechIshikawa Kuraji1901Suzuki Nobuyuki190219041906Haga Yaichi1905Yoshioka Kyōsuke1906ten parts of speech1933ten parts of speechMitsuya Shigematsu1908Hoshina Kōichi1909ten parts of speech1917nine parts of speechTsuge Zenzō1916Yamada Yoshio191719221938nine parts of speechFujimura Tsukuru and Shimazu Hisamoto1921Yoshizawa Yoshinori1923ten parts of speechHashimoto Shinkichi1935Tōjō Misao1937eleven parts of speechHiroshima Higher Normal School1937ten parts of speechIwai Yoshio1937ten parts of speechKindaichi Kyōsuke1939Iwabuchi Etsutarō1943ten parts of speech
The term assumed different meanings, such as a verb form ( or ) that precedes a noun, or as a proposed alternative to , because Japanese "adjectives" are verb-like in nature, unlike European adjectives. As shown in the table, Matsushita Daizaburō (1924) used keiyōshi explicitly for the Eurocentric idea of adjectives as words that precede nouns, while reserving keiyō dōshi for Japanese "adjectives" as verb-like words (although later in 1928, he swapped out keiyōshi for to avoid confusion, on the model of as words that precede verbs). Ochiai Naobumi (1895) defined keiyō dōshi not as a grammatical category, but as a semantic one with meanings similar to those of stative verbs (, ). It was not until Haga Yaichi's usage in 1905 that keiyō dōshi came to be refer to adjectival words whose ended with or (in modern Japanese, they end with ).
The of today has followed Iwabuchi Etsutarō's model outlined in his 1943 grammar, , compiled for the . It recognizes 10 parts of speech as shown in the table.