I'm learning grammar using Tae Kim's guide and I have a kind of stupid question (probably):
In the lesson on relative clause and sentence order (
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/clause) he says that you can directly modify nouns with past, negative or past-negative verbs OR nous, giving an example:
子供だったアリスが立派な大人になった。
The Alice that was a child became a fine adult.
Which, as I understand, means that:
Child(past form) + Alice => "Alice (that was a child)"
However, he says that you cannot modify nouns with nouns using だ, and that modifying nouns with nouns is done by the use of の particle, which, he says, is to be explained in a later article. But all the examples he gives for that particle are about posession, and so I wonder, can you actually do it with の or is there another way?
If 子供だったアリス means roughly "Alice (that was a child)", does 子供のアリス mean "Alice (that is a child)"? Is の situational, meaning, you derive from context wether "BのA" means "B's A" of "A of B", as in "Bob's Book" or "University of America", or if it means "A (that is B)", as in "Alice (that is a child)"?
PS: As a side question, Tae Kim usually explains everything to bits, but he doesn't touch on janai/kunai/datta/nakatta (or did I miss it?). He only says that when you apply past, negative or both to a noun, it functions like an i-adjective and can be used as such.
Can someone give me a link (or explain if it's simple) about this in depth? Like, why can't you attach だ, and so on and so forth?
I understood from his lessons that だ is an explicit and affirming declaration, and です is not a polite version of だ, because you can say ですか？ for a polite question but だか？ would make no sense because you make an authoritive declaration while at the same time being unsure of what you say (asking). But that's as far as he's gone.
But can someone explain everything else related to those?
1) Why cannot you attach だ to a i-adjective or negative form of a noun? You can only declare positives, you cannot ever declare something is not something in japanese? And why can you delcare something is 好き（likeable, na-adj) but not かわいい(cute, i-adj)? What is the property difference that prevents i-adj to be declared?
2) Can you attach だ to past form (だった/かった）? Can you attach か? Why?
3) What actually is 子供だった or 学生じゃない? I mean, in terms of japanese language? Is it a "participle"? Do they even have such a thing as participles? Or is it treated absolutely equal to an i-adjective, for all means and purposes, and even considered to be one - like, same as attaching かわいい to 人 applies features of "belonging-to-a-set-of-things-that-are-considered-cute" to a human, attaching 学生じゃない to 人 applies features of "not-belonging-to-set-of-students" to a human?
Thanks!
Edited: 2013-11-08, 10:04 am
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