I've been doing my own japanese dictionary and came across verb form generation. I've done same thing as it's done on Jim Breen's web page. But problem is that on that page all verb forms are generated without exception. I went a little bit further and tried to generate only those verb forms that apply to a certain verb group.

Thus I came across non-volitional verbs. I've tried to find any kind of reference to list of non-volitional verbs but found nothing. Does anybody have any idea if it's possible to obtain it?

I need the list because for example there is no volitional/imperative/potential verb form for non-volitional verbs.

For now I found some non-volitional verbs:
分かる
分る
解る
判る
聞こえる
聴こえる
聞える
聴える
出来る
出來る
在る
有る
見える
悲しむ
好む
居る
知る
識る
違う
似合う
疲れる

I'd be thankful for any kind of information I'd get.

Btw I'm not native english speaker so I probably made some mistakes. Hopefully my question will be understood.

I found out, from another forum where I posted the same question, an answer. Or at least half of it.

Basically all intransitive verbs don't have potential, volitional and imperative forms. So I can exclude them. The rest of transitive verbs I'll probably have to go through manually. Maybe someday I'll post, for all those interested, a complete list of non-volitional verbs. Or better yet list of volitional verbs, which will be shorter.

You're not going to get a complete list; that's just not possible. It's like asking for a complete list of things you can buy at a Japanese supermarket or a complete list of all words related to baseball. It's too much work.

Ok maybe I exaggerated. I should have said "complete" list of common verbs. I have around 20 000 verbs in my database now (including nouns that can act as verb -suru). So if I can separate non-volitional verbs among those 20k I can say that my job is done. There may be other verbs out there, but I think if I have at least this much verbs covered it's enough.

But yes. Asking for a complete list was asking a bit too much. Especially since when it comes to languages, complete is always relative.

Going through a list of 20,000 words and picking out the non-volitional verbs is still a massive task. You'll just have to figure them out for yourself as you get more experience.

dacker Wrote:Basically all intransitive verbs don't have potential, volitional and imperative forms.

Hmm.
座る : to sit (intransitive)
通勤電車で座れる : to be able to sit on a commuter train (potential)
どこかで座りましょう : let's sit down somewhere (volitional)
座れ! : sit down! (imperative)

pm215: it seems you're right. I checked a little bit and it seems I got satisfied too fast. For example same goes for intransitive verb 泳ぐ(to swim). So it's back to the drawing board.

yudantaiteki: well I've been doing my dictionary for well over 3 years, so checking 20,000 words for me is a feasible task. But it will be time cosuming...


Bottom line: Non-volitional verbs are NOT limited only to transitive verbs.

Why are you making your own dictionary?

Well most of online dictionaries are japanese-english(or english-japanese). But there is no japanese dictionary for my language. So I'm slowly building it, traslating words/kanji etc.

Basically I started it for myself because when using other japanese-english dictionaries I didn't find what I was looking for. Also I'm hoping in the future someone who speaks my language will find it useful...or not

Ah, okay. What's your language, out of curiosity?

Are you translating an English/Japanese dictionary, or going directly from a Japanese dictionary?

I'm Slovene, so language is Slovenian.

Basically I took Jim Breen's dictionary and started building from there. When translating I'm using many sources (english and japanese).

Are you intending to go through your entire database of words and tag all your verbs as volitional and non-volitional? Why would you do this? Do you intend to check a verbs volitionality every time before using it just so you can comply to some prescriptive grammar rule that native speakers do not even follow? I'd spend my time on more useful pursuits if I were you. Just read plenty and you'll get a sense for when different verbs are used in different forms by native speakers, and if you are unsure about the grammaticality of something you want to say, you can always google it or ask someone.

In the long run I intend to do that. Anyway I'll go through the words when translating, so setting one more tag is not such a difficult task. Otherwise I agree that it would be wasting time just going through and setting tags. Although I've been doing things like that in the past.

Ok fair enough. My main point though was that volition/non-volition isn't actually a useful tag to add and isn't always clear cut (words can be both). You pretty much need to see the word in a particular context before you can make the call whether it's volitional or not in that particular context. This point was debated on the forum a while back. Here it is.

Thank for the information. I read through the thread which you posted. After reading it at first I thought it's really useless to know if verb is "volitional" or not. Especially with all the arguments in the thread. But the more I thought about it the less it seemed useless.

I should refrase my statement. Again. Since a verb can act as "volitional" or "non-volitional" depending on the context. I can put a flag which say if a verb has option of being volitional. So if it's purely "non-volitional", without exception, I would not show volitional (and other forms), otherwise I would show everything.

Hopefully I can accomplish that. Of course I realized for that I would need a bit more knowledge on japanese language that I have now.

Side question:
Because I'm just not sure. 死ぬ (to die) and 喜ぶ (to be glad) can be "volitional"? Since they can have forms in imperative.
喜べ (rejoice!)
死ね (die!)