yudantaiteki Wrote:NominalがPredicate is a tough issue because there are some so called "na-adjectives" that can't go in there, like *きれいがいい, but then others can, like 元気がいい. Although words don't have to be only one word class.
...
Does 亭主は留守がいい make any sense?

Rikaichan (that most authoritative of dictionaries, lol, although dictionary.goo.ne.jp agrees) lists 元気 as being (adj-na,n), ie both a na-adjective and a noun. きれい is listed as only being adj-na. 留守 is listed as (n,vs), ie not an adjective at all.

[noun]がいい is grammatically correct but [na adjective]がいい isn't? Seems like a down side to considering na adjectives and nouns the same thing.

yudantaiteki Wrote:zigmonty:

Quote:We have a sign on a door at work "注意をして出ましょう". Clearly this doesn't mean be careful, then stop being careful and exit. It isn't two actions in sequence, it's "exit carefully".

This is why I like JSL's description of -te forms -- in this case, the 注意をする is actualized, then the next action occurs -- "actualization" does not mean that the action stops before the next one occurs. This also explains things like 遅れて来ました. Often these are explained as adverbial; I think this is more confusing but whatever makes people understand it is fine.

I like hearing these alternative explanations. Even though i have no real trouble understanding the use in practice, i find looking at it from other angles helps cement it in my mind. Add me to the list of people interested in this grammar guide you're writing.

zigmonty Wrote:[noun]がいい is grammatically correct but [na adjective]がいい isn't? Seems like a down side to considering na adjectives and nouns the same thing.

Definitely. My main gripe with "i-adjective" and "na-adjective" is that you're making two totally different grammatical categories seem similar just because they happen to both translate into English as adjectives.

I still think it's "better" overall to lump na-adj and noun together as "nominals" (together with other non-conjugating words that aren't particles) and just recognize that there are various types of nominals -- some can only go in predicate position. But there's no perfect answer to this.

What do you think of JMW's mention?

http://books.google.com/books?id=xaXukH7...&q&f=false

I find magamo's explanation a nice complement to this.

At first I was puzzled by the meaning of 亭主元気で留守がいい, but I immediately looked it at the dictionary from which magamo likes to draw many of his example sentences.
This types of sentences are easily understandable when you hear them, but may be difficult to understand when you read them isolated from any context. In a language, such as Japanese, where meaning of a sentence is highly context dependent, grammar rules alone are just simply not enough for correct understanding. The following explanation of grammar points in this sentence is clumsy and much more difficult to understand than the sentence itself.
Japanese native speakers are better in Japanese than foreign-learners not because they know grammar rules better, but because they are more familiar with possible context and actual usage.

For what it's worth:

yudantaiteki Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:[noun]がいい is grammatically correct but [na adjective]がいい isn't? Seems like a down side to considering na adjectives and nouns the same thing.

Definitely. My main gripe with "i-adjective" and "na-adjective" is that you're making two totally different grammatical categories seem similar just because they happen to both translate into English as adjectives.

I still think it's "better" overall to lump na-adj and noun together as "nominals" (together with other non-conjugating words that aren't particles) and just recognize that there are various types of nominals -- some can only go in predicate position. But there's no perfect answer to this.

Yeah... there are different classes of words, most of which have a noun modification form, and most can be used as a predicate. I prefer to leave it as that.

I've seen the term adj-no used to describe a noun modifying a noun with の, and there's a certain logic to that if that noun is used more often in an adjectival role than as a stand-alone noun. There are also weird ones like 大きな, which superficially looks like a na-adjective but can't be used as a predicate (for what it's worth, rikaichan lists it as adj-f, a separate class to adj-na).

Then you get verbs modifying nouns, which in japanese work far closer to how adjectives work than similar clauses do in english. Unlike english, what is and isn't an adjective is quite blurred. Is つまらない an i-adjective (形容詞) or is it the verb つまる conjugated negatively (i'm aware that ない is considered a 形容詞)? I don't know the etymology but there seem to be quite a few 形容詞 that look suspiciously like verbs.

yudantaiteki Wrote:NominalがPredicate is a tough issue because there are some so called "na-adjectives" that can't go in there, like *きれいがいい, but then others can, like 元気がいい. Although words don't have to be only one word class.

The thing is that きれいがいい isn't completely ungrammatical. While I understand why it's considered nonstandard, it does appear in native speakers' speech and has a distinctive nuance which is hard to express by other expressions. It's more informal and colloquial than generally accepted expressions.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Does 亭主は留守がいい make any sense?

Yes. But I can see how it can be marked ungrammatical. Anyway, its meaning is similar to "亭主は留守の方がいい" and "亭主は留守でいてくれた方がいい."

If you google 留守, you can find examples by native speakers where 留守 is used just like any other na adjective like 元気:

あるマンションに、いつも留守な人がいました。
むしろ留守な人はそのほうが助かります。
ただ、夏休みで留守な人が多いのですぐには無理かなあ。

I think these would be considered nonstandard by stricter standards. But their meanings are clear.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

Quote:Thanks for explaining JSL's terminology and explanation. It seems it's based on a very anti-形容動詞 theory, which is actually one of popular theories in Japan. That was interesting.

Overall I like it, although it has a hard time explaining why 親切 and 先生 are both nominals but can't always go in the same constructions. I've been trying to develop a theory of "predicate position nominals" and "noun-position nominals" or something like that but I'm really not sure.

I feel like each nominal has its own adjective-ness that determines how much it behaves like a na adjective. Etymologically na adjectives (or nominal adjectives in another terminology) were nouns before. So it's not surprising if many of them are in-between words.

zigmonty Wrote:Yes, i don't know if i am using the terms correctly, but i see those as adverbial uses of て form, in that it forms a clause that is modifying the rest of the sentence. We have a sign on a door at work "注意をして出ましょう". Clearly this doesn't mean be careful, then stop being careful and exit. It isn't two actions in sequence, it's "exit carefully". "注意をせずに出ます" is just the opposite. If, on the other hand, they are clearly two actions in sequence, then it's just a list of actions.

This is just the ad hoc rationalisation of a learner. Thinking like that has helped me parse those structures in a way that makes sense to my english brain. I have no idea if that's how japanese people see it or if it has any correctness to it.

I also think that's practically the simplest and quite versatile way to see it. If you also allows te form/masu stem/its equivalent notion to link to a noun or any kind of clause like pm215's understanding, it can cover a wider range of sentences which would otherwise be hard to analyze by stricter grammar rules. Since it's simpler and more versatile, theoretically speaking, there must be a risk of false positive errors just like any other rough rule would. But in real life situations, I guess most of the time there is enough context to make sense because obviously you're doing pretty fine with the adverbial rule.

It's inevitable to restrict linking and consider word classes in more detail if you want to give a more precise explanation. This is more so when you want to cover 連用中止/te form involving na adjectives in a logical manner. At this point you can't avoid the problem of noun vs. na adjective and such as you have seen in this thread. A stricter rule would be particularly vulnerable to ambiguity between word classes. The original 亭主 sentence and some other examples are of this kind, which I thought no simple explanation from a beginner's textbook would handle effectively and easily.

zigmonty Wrote:

magamo Wrote:So as I already posted, in my opinion, it's analyzed as 亭主は(元気で留守)がいい

My brain sees it as grammatically ambiguous. I could read it either as 亭主は(元気で留守)がいい (husbands are best lively and away) or 亭主は元気で(留守がいい) (husband is lively and best away). OK, so crap translation aside, why is it obvious that it should be parsed the first way, other than that way makes more sense as an idiom? Just because it's obvious to a native speaker which way it should be interpreted, that doesn't mean it's obvious from grammar alone. "Time flies like an arrow" right?

It *is* an idiom. Just because it has correct grammar and its true meaning logically follows from its literal meaning doesn't mean it's not an idiom. "A stitch in time saves nine" is an idiom. No native speaker understands what it means by literally thinking of someone sowing up a tear. It is a single sentence-sized word in the mind of a native speaker, with instant recognition of meaning. Once you know what it's supposed to mean, it appears obvious, but it isn't. It usually has to be explained to kids.

I personally think that generally you can't change words in an idiom while keeping the same degree of making sense. But you can modify 亭主は元気で留守がいい so it reads 嫁は若くて綺麗がいい, 娘は元気でかわいいが一番, やっぱり町はきれいで静かがいい！etc. I just came up with these sentences each of which has the exact same or slightly different grammatical structure and different words. They all make sense the same way and can be parsed in the same manner. This time the meaning of each word used in the sentences is literal and not particularly related to culture. If they were all idioms, it would mean you could freely coin idioms by using the same grammar structure as long as the literal meanings of words go together.

The null particle in 亭主元気で留守がいい may be considered an idiom-like use, which pm215 found difficult. The rhythm is playing an important role to make it sound ok or even better to drop は. The famous 5 moras + 7 moras+ 5 moras combination in haiku is a prime example of the extreme cases. As you can see in the video Asriel posted, it's a made-up slogan in a comical TV ad. So probably that's why the original version preferred better rhythm; if you count the number of moras before each particle including the particle itself, it reads 7 + 3 + 2 = 7 + 5, sounding like the second and third parts of a pseudo-haiku.

The latter two of the three word-swapped examples I gave are constructed so they don't rely on this kind of rhythm to prove they still make sense the same way. Then again, it's almost impossible for a native speaker's conscious mind to catch every minute rhythm factor which might affect correctness of an example. So I guess it's not extremely unlikely that they are actually idioms the same way as haiku, slogans, and similar phrases where rhythm and rhyme are playing an important role.

zigmonty Wrote:Unlike english, what is and isn't an adjective is quite blurred.

You native speakers never realize how crazily English words cross over between word-class boundaries.

The rule every English learner learns says that you add "-ly" to an adjective to get an adverb and "-ity," "-ness," etc. to get a noun version. For example, "real" is an adjective as in "real life." And its noun version is "reality" and adverb version "really." The same goes for other adjectives like "quick -> quickly -> quickness".

Japanese guy: I gotta learn English real quick.
American: No, you can't. Get real. That shit is real hard. Really hard.
Japanese guy: Really?
American: Really.
Japanese guy: For real?
American: I shit you not.
Japanese guy: Are you serious?
American: Dead.
Japanese guy: Seriously?
American: You know, no one can learn a language quickly.
Japanese: But I said, "real quick," not "quickly."

I don't see where the problem ever comes from concerning -te, in my opinion it's just magamo focusing on "Non-native speakers problems". It just takes time that's all, no different than it was for yourself magamo, as you will see for yourself only beginners have trouble, why's that? not enough practice.

magamo Wrote:I feel like each nominal has its own adjective-ness that determines how much it behaves like a na adjective. Etymologically na adjectives (or nominal adjectives in another terminology) were nouns before. So it's not surprising if many of them are in-between words.

Interesting. I guess this is where the people who argue grammar doesn't exist come out of the woodwork. It's all just usage.

magamo Wrote:I personally think that generally you can't change words in an idiom while keeping the same degree of making sense. But you can modify 亭主は元気で留守がいい so it reads 嫁は若くて綺麗がいい, 娘は元気でかわいいが一番, やっぱり町はきれいで静かがいい！etc. I just came up with these sentences each of which has the exact same or slightly different grammatical structure and different words. They all make sense the same way and can be parsed in the same manner. This time the meaning of each word used in the sentences is literal and not particularly related to culture. If they were all idioms, it would mean you could freely coin idioms by using the same grammar structure as long as the literal meanings of words go together.

Interestingly, none of those sentences gave me the least bit of trouble. Grammatically they are identical to the original (if you consider 元気で the て form of 元気). There is a difference in that not only do those more or less line up with my cultural bias but they are more obviously a pairing of positive attributes. 元気で留守がいい just seemed nonsensical enough that i struggled to parse it. Perhaps its more unfamiliarity with a sentence pattern and requiring context to figure it out rather than strictly speaking being an idiom.

magamo Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Unlike english, what is and isn't an adjective is quite blurred.

You native speakers never realize how crazily English words cross over between word-class boundaries.

The rule every English learner learns says that you add "-ly" to an adjective to get an adverb and "-ity," "-ness," etc. to get a noun version. For example, "real" is an adjective as in "real life." And its noun version is "reality" and adverb version "really." The same goes for other adjectives like "quick -> quickly -> quickness".

This isn't crossing word class boundaries any more than 暑さ is 暑い doing the same. Conjugating a word and having its class change is common to both languages. I meant more the fact that verbs modifying nouns sit in the same position in the sentence as adjectives do. This means that you can consider a negative verb or even a little mini expression as an adjective. 頭のいい is listed in WWWJIC as an i-adjective all by itself. In japanese, you can say 頭のいい人. In english, that would be more like "person with a good head" rather than "good headed person". The latter makes sense but sounds off. So is 頭のいい a subordinate clause or is it an indivisible word? Most people would say the former but considering it's idiomatic enough to justify its own dictionary entry, it's hard to say.

Edit: a better example is 格好いい. Taught to beginners as a word and in the dictionary as one. Or is it 格好がいい with the particle dropped? It certainly conjugates as いい does.

Besides, if you want a good example of how f-ed up english can be, there's this from Calvin and Hobbes: "Verbing weirds english". The lack of any sort of required suffix on verbs means that any word can be conjugated and treated as a verb, regardless of what the dictionary says its word class is. Some feel it's grammatically incorrect. These people are prescriptive idiots.

zigmonty Wrote:

magamo Wrote:But you can modify 亭主は元気で留守がいい so it reads 嫁は若くて綺麗がいい, 娘は元気でかわいいが一番, やっぱり町はきれいで静かがいい！etc.

Interestingly, none of those sentences gave me the least bit of trouble. Grammatically they are identical to the original (if you consider 元気で the て form of 元気). There is a difference in that not only do those more or less line up with my cultural bias but they are more obviously a pairing of positive attributes. 元気で留守がいい just seemed nonsensical enough that i struggled to parse it. Perhaps its more unfamiliarity with a sentence pattern and requiring context to figure it out rather than strictly speaking being an idiom.

Yeah, I think I found it was one of those sentences that just had too many "not quite sure about that" elements in it all at once: I didn't know 亭主, the dropped particle made the grammar structure a bit less immediately obvious, there was the actual bit of grammar we're discussing, there's the unspoken cultural implication in 元気, no wider context that might give a clue. All of which added up to confusion even though any one of them in some other sentence wouldn't have been much of an obstacle.

zigmonty Wrote:Interestingly, none of those sentences gave me the least bit of trouble. Grammatically they are identical to the original (if you consider 元気で the て form of 元気). There is a difference in that not only do those more or less line up with my cultural bias but they are more obviously a pairing of positive attributes. 元気で留守がいい just seemed nonsensical enough that i struggled to parse it. Perhaps its more unfamiliarity with a sentence pattern and requiring context to figure it out rather than strictly speaking being an idiom.

Interesting. Grammar portions like かわいいが一番 may be considered nonstandard or too colloquial by stricter standards. But as you said,

Quote:These people are prescriptive idiots.

zigmonty Wrote:This isn't crossing word class boundaries any more than 暑さ is 暑い doing the same.

He he. So you didn't find the dialogue strange? It was to illustrate how adjectives like "real" are used as adverbs WITHOUT changing their form when grammar says you should say "really" and such, i.e., words aren't following the rule in the dialogue. Oh, wait. It might be due to my poor grammar... But anyway:

Japanese guy: I gotta learn English real quick. (Grammar says they should be "really quickly.")
American: No, you can't. Get real. That shit is real hard. Really hard. (Why are they different when they must be grammatically the same?)
Japanese guy: Really?
American: Really.
Japanese guy: For real? ("Real" as a noun? I know this is an idiom, though.)
American: I shit you not.
Japanese guy: Are you serious?
American: Dead. (The grammar rule says "dead serious" must be "deadly serious.")
Japanese guy: Seriously?
American: You know, no one can learn a language quickly. (This time this guy uses "quickly" when it was "quick" before.)
Japanese: But I said, "real quick," not "quickly."

Other "real"s and "serious"s may be puzzling depending on how a learner is taught English grammar.

pm215 Wrote:Yeah, I think I found it was one of those sentences that just had too many "not quite sure about that" elements in it all at once: I didn't know 亭主, the dropped particle made the grammar structure a bit less immediately obvious, there was the actual bit of grammar we're discussing, there's the unspoken cultural implication in 元気, no wider context that might give a clue. All of which added up to confusion even though any one of them in some other sentence wouldn't have been much of an obstacle.

I see how it was confusing now. On the other hand, zigmonty got it right without trouble. And it doesn't seem like he finds other examples problematic. If he can easily comprehend all the other examples in this thread and many real examples he came across in real life, most likely his way of understanding works best in a practical sense (at least for him). [Edit] Ah, I'm not saying you're doing it wrong; we all know your Japanese is awesome. Oh, and I think "do it wrong" should be "do it wrongly" according to grammar I learned at school.

magamo Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Interestingly, none of those sentences gave me the least bit of trouble. Grammatically they are identical to the original (if you consider 元気で the て form of 元気). There is a difference in that not only do those more or less line up with my cultural bias but they are more obviously a pairing of positive attributes. 元気で留守がいい just seemed nonsensical enough that i struggled to parse it. Perhaps its more unfamiliarity with a sentence pattern and requiring context to figure it out rather than strictly speaking being an idiom.

Interesting. Grammar portions like かわいいが一番 may be considered nonstandard or too colloquial by stricter standards. But as you said,

Quote:These people are prescriptive idiots.

I can understand it, but i can't vouch for its correctness nor would i ever produce such a sentence. Being able to tell something is wrong beyond that you just wouldn't say it is a skill far above recognition.

magamo Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:This isn't crossing word class boundaries any more than 暑さ is 暑い doing the same.

He he. So you didn't find the dialogue strange? It was to illustrate how adjectives like "real" are used as adverbs WITHOUT changing their form when grammar says you should say "really" and such, i.e., words aren't following the rule in the dialogue. Oh, wait. It might be due to my poor grammar... But anyway:

Japanese guy: I gotta learn English real quick. (Grammar says they should be "really quickly.")
American: No, you can't. Get real. That shit is real hard. Really hard. (Why are they different when they must be grammatically the same?)
Japanese guy: Really?
American: Really.
Japanese guy: For real? ("Real" as a noun? I know this is an idiom, though.)
American: I shit you not.
Japanese guy: Are you serious?
American: Dead. (The grammar rule says "dead serious" must be "deadly serious.")
Japanese guy: Seriously?
American: You know, no one can learn a language quickly. (This time this guy uses "quickly" when it was "quick" before.)
Japanese: But I said, "real quick," not "quickly."

Other "real"s and "serious"s may be puzzling depending on how a learner is taught English grammar.

Heh heh, you got me. I think its is more a case of assuming its the same word with the same meaning being used differently grammatically, rather than a different word with a different meaning that happens to look and sound identical (). "Real quick" is not the same as "really quick". The nuance is different. The former is far more colloquial and feels closer to 超速い. "Really quick" is closer to 本当に速い. That's the feeling i get, anyway, assuming my japanese is correct (which it probably isn't). Same for dead serious and deadly serious. "Deadly serious" may be said to someone to emphasis that not believing the speaker may lead to actual deaths. Dead serious is just emphasizing that you're serious. Deadly serious would sound wrong (or exaggerated) in the dialog you posted. The versions without ly are being used purely as emphasis, whereas the -ly versions retain more of the meaning of the original word. Just the opinion of one native speaker though.

Besides, we all know that f*ck is the most flexible word in the english language. F*ck the f*cking f*ckers.

magamo Wrote:On the other hand, zigmonty got it right without trouble. And it doesn't seem like he finds other examples problematic. If he can easily comprehend all the other examples in this thread and many real examples he came across in real life, most likely his way of understanding works best in a practical sense (at least for him).

Lol... not quite. Unless by "got it right without trouble" you mean i stared at it for several minutes after looking up the word 亭主 and was still extremely unsure what it meant. I wasn't surprised when i found the explanation but that's a long way from understanding it real quick () without assistance.

zigmonty Wrote:I can understand it, but i can't vouch for its correctness nor would i ever produce such a sentence. Being able to tell something is wrong beyond that you just wouldn't say it is a skill far above recognition.

I know what you mean. For example, spotting a near-native speaker from his grammar and word choice is quite difficult and requires genuine native fluency. I'd say that's what separates native speakers from nonnative speakers, though obviously this is a circular definition.

zigmonty Wrote:Heh heh, you got me. I think its is more a case of assuming its the same word with the same meaning being used differently grammatically, rather than a different word with a different meaning that happens to look and sound identical (). "Real quick" is not the same as "really quick". The nuance is different. The former is far more colloquial and feels closer to 超速い. "Really quick" is closer to 本当に速い. That's the feeling i get, anyway, assuming my japanese is correct (which it probably isn't). Same for dead serious and deadly serious. "Deadly serious" may be said to someone to emphasis that not believing the speaker may lead to actual deaths. Dead serious is just emphasizing that you're serious. Deadly serious would sound wrong (or exaggerated) in the dialog you posted. The versions without ly are being used purely as emphasis, whereas the -ly versions retain more of the meaning of the original word. Just the opinion of one native speaker though.

If I were to translate, "do it real quick" would be "速攻でやる," "ちょっぱやでやる," or something along those lines. 超速い sounds very much like "real quick" to my ear too.

In my mind, the colloquial/informal tone of "real quick" etc. is similar to the slight ungrammatical feeling of the creative use of nouns as na adjectives, e.g., 彼、ちょっとアレなひとだから。 (You know, he's a little too unique, if you get my drift.) Here アレ (pronoun "that") is used as a na adjective to mean "a person of that kind = (アレ), which I think you know what I mean." It seems like any Japanese noun can work as a na adjective as long as the resulting sentence makes sense. This kind of adjective use sounds very colloquial and slightly ungrammatical in a sense. The more the noun is accepted as an adjective, the less informal it is. And genuine na adjectives won't give any informal tone.

zigmonty Wrote:Besides, we all know that f*ck is the most flexible word in the english language. F*ck the f*cking f*ckers.

Yeah, it's unf*uckingbelievable. That little sucker even shows up in the middle of a word.

zigmonty Wrote:Lol... not quite. Unless by "got it right without trouble" you mean i stared at it for several minutes after looking up the word 亭主 and was still extremely unsure what it meant. I wasn't surprised when i found the explanation but that's a long way from understanding it real quick () without assistance.

Aha ha. But clearly you're on the right track!

zigmonty Wrote:Besides, if you want a good example of how f-ed up english can be, there's this from Calvin and Hobbes: "Verbing weirds english".

Dang! Someone got it before me!

Meh, regardless:

Interesting thread, although I have to agree with the initial reactions to the 亭主 sentence in that there wasn't any context (cultural or otherwise) which was my primary barrier to understanding it. I understood the words and the grammar "husband is well, being gone is good" but it wasn't until I read the Japanese explanation and realized "Oh yeah, a lot of Japanese husbands overwork themselves and don't see their home much, now I remember" did the sentence actually click.

It would be like posting: "We're not in Kansas anymore," and asking non-native speakers who've never seen The Wizard of Oz to deconstruct the meaning of it without any other context.

Additionally, when you post a sentence like that and shroud it in mystery ("I won't translate it till blah blah blah happens..." you're encouraging people to doubt themselves and their interpretation of it before they even take a shot at deconstructing it.

magamo Wrote:If I were to translate, "do it real quick" would be "速攻でやる," "ちょっぱやでやる," or something along those lines. 超速い sounds very much like "real quick" to my ear too.

Sweet... And i learned some new words lol.

magamo Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Besides, we all know that f*ck is the most flexible word in the english language. F*ck the f*cking f*ckers.

Yeah, it's unf*uckingbelievable. That little sucker even shows up in the middle of a word.

Surprised no one linked this, i couldn't access it from work:

@Asriel: That's the one!