Japanese adjectives

This article deals with Japanese equivalents of English adjectives. In Japanese, nouns and verbs can modify nouns, with nouns taking the 〜の particles when functioning attributively (in the genitive case), and verbs in the attributive form (連体形 rentaikei). These are considered separate classes of words, however. Most of the words that can be considered to be adjectives in Japanese fall into one of two categories – variants of verbs, and nouns: adjectival verb (Japanese: 形容詞, keiyōshi, literally 形容 "description" or "appearance" + 詞 "word"), or i-adjectives These can be considered specialized verbs, in that they inflect for various aspects such as past tense or negation, and they can be used predicatively to end a sentence, without the need for any other "to be" verb. For example, atsui (暑い) "hot": 暑い日 (Atsui hi) ("a hot day") 今日は暑い。(Kyō wa atsui.) ("Today is hot.") adjectival noun (形容動詞, keiyō-dōshi, literally 形容 "description" or "appearance" + 動詞 "verb"), or na-adjectives These can be considered a form of noun in terms of syntax; these attach to the copula, which then inflects, but use 〜な -na (rather than the genitive 〜の) when modifying a noun. For example, hen (変) "strange": 変な人 (Hen-na hito) ("a strange person") 彼は変だ。(Kare wa hen da.) ("He is strange.") Both the predicative forms (終止形 shūshikei, also called the "conclusive form" or "terminal form") and attributive forms (連体形 rentaikei) of adjectival verbs and adjectival nouns can be analyzed as verb phrases, making the attributive forms of adjectival verbs and adjectival nouns relative clauses, rather than adjectives. According to this analysis, Japanese has no syntactic adjectives. Japanese adjectives that do not fall into either of these categories are usually grouped into a grab-bag category: attributives (連体詞, rentaishi, literally 連 "connects, goes with" + 体 "body", short for 体言 "uninflecting word" such as a noun + 詞 "word") These may only occur before nouns, and not in a predicative position.