![]() nominal adjectives (names vary, also called na-adjectives or "adjectival nouns").verbal nouns (correspond to English gerunds like 'studying', 'jumping', which denote activities).Japanese has five major lexical word classes: The particle ka turns a statement into a question, while the others express the speaker's attitude towards the statement. 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 ka, ne, and yo. In Japanese, such "gapping" must proceed in the reverse order: "Bob mother for some flowers and father for tie bought". 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. Head-finality prevails also when sentences are coordinated instead of subordinated. Translating the phrase "the man who was walking down the street" into Japanese word order would be "street down walking was man". 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. Head-finality in Japanese sentence structure carries over to the building of sentences using other sentences. By contrast, the Japanese language is consistently head-final: Moreover, genitive phrases can be either head-initial or head-final in English. Looking at the preceding list, English for example is mostly head-initial, but nouns follow the adjectives which modify them. Some languages are inconsistent in constituent order, having a mixture of head-initial phrase types and head-final phrase types. noun modified by an adjective ("black cat").comparison (" bigger than Y", i.e., "compared to Y, X is big").noun governed by an adposition (" on the table", " underneath the table").genitive phrase, i.e., noun modified by another noun ("the cover of the book", "the book's cover").Some of these phrase types, with the head marked in boldface, are: The head of a phrase either precedes its modifier (head-initial) or follows it (head-final). Each one has a head and possibly a modifier. The modern theory of constituent order ("word order"), usually attributed to Joseph Harold Greenberg, identifies several kinds of phrases. In language typology, it has many features different from most European languages.ĭistinctive aspects of modern Japanese sentence structure Word order: head-final and left-branching 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. ![]() Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. 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. ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) ( June 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation and footnoting. The reason given is: The citation style is inconsistent throughout the article. This article has an unclear citation style.
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