What I think would be interesting for us to do to collectively add to everyone's knowledge is to have a discussion about varying Japanese grammatical points.

The first topic that we should try is adverbs. Talk anything about Japanese adverbs. All those onomatopoeia and what common expressions are with them, the so called four morae adverbs like yukkuri, etc., adverbs that have to agree with syntax, etc.

I think it would be a great way to alternate topics and see what people are missing. People could find words that they would have never otherwise searched for or found.

So, again, discuss anything about adverbs. You could even get into Classical Japanese adverbs like をさをさ. Perhaps an interesting dialectical adverb like えーころ.

After this topic, I was thinking abbreviations. Some of my favorite are スマホ、スケボ、等.

Let's have a thread where people freely talk about their current favorite grammatical aspect of Japanese. Hopefully what people will bring forth will be insightful.

So, let's begin!

副詞について語らい合いましょう！

could somebody please give me their opinion as where to draw the line between grammar point and vocab item?

I once read or had a question (don't recall which) about a word modifying another and someone (guess it wasn't me) was confused how an adverb could do that. Someone considerably replied stating that Japanese doesn't really have adverbs in the same way English does and what we think of as "adverbs" in Japanese still function as nouns and its important to remember that. The person said in beginner classes it helps to teach the words as adverbs for beginner's sakes but its a crutch that hurts you as you get more advanced.

I've never heard this repeated anywhere else but when ever "adverbs" are brought up in a discussion on Japanese grammar; it jumps to mind.

@HonyakuJoshua: Grammar is pragmatics, best way that I can tell. Even in English classes, what gets taught as grammar is still fairly close to "sentence patterns with defined meaning that we reuse a lot."

Wiki Wrote:"grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics."

So yep, words too

Some adverbs in Japanese are etymologically nouns. Others come from the 連用形 of adjectives. In a sense if you were to parallel this with the fact the same base for verbs does result in nouns. To say that something like 必ず or any other adverb in Japanese couldn't be compared to an English adverb is kind of out there. If all adverbs in Japanese functioned just like nouns, then case particles could follow them. However, only adverbial particles are.

i think it's better to just use j-gram.org
They already have discussions for nearly every grammar point you can imagine.

So too does my site, but that's not the point of this discussion. The point is is to openly discuss anything about Japanese grammar at some length. I contribute to unilang and we've made a similar thread where people make a decent half page about a given language.

I also wouldn't consider anything on j-gram to be a "discussion". Most of the content is simply example sentences, some--if there are any--notes, and comments.

Edit: That is not to say that j-gram is not good because it just kicks ass when it comes to a plethora of example sentences. The community is quick to spot sentences that are not right too. It does need to be cleaned up though.

I don't like using the term "adverb" in Japanese because it doesn't refer to any consistent grammatical pattern. There are a number of different ways to make Japanese constructions that correspond to English adverbs, and I don't think it helps to try to lump them all under a single term just because English (or Latin) had them as a consistent category.

Such things like this is why such a thread is needed so things like this can be talked about.

You have some like 頗る。

honyakujoshua Wrote:could somebody please give me their opinion as where to draw the line between grammar point and vocab item?

I once read or heard somewhere on the internet a definition for grammar as "everything about a language that someone else thinks you have to learn apart from the vocabulary."

The key points:

if you learn anything what so ever other than words, then whether intentionally or not, you have learned some grammar.

who are you trying to satisfy?

Personally I think, all you need is:
the ability to go back to dictionary form of conjugated words. (but you'd figure it out eventually anyway)
understand the ordering of subordinate clauses
realize that japanese uses postpositions.
Understand how はがをに effect a words role in the sentence.

Everything else (I think) can be determined from word definitions.

vix86 Wrote:@HonyakuJoshua: Grammar is pragmatics, best way that I can tell. Even in English classes, what gets taught as grammar is still fairly close to "sentence patterns with defined meaning that we reuse a lot."

I disagree with this definition a bit. For example, Noam Chomsky presented the following two sentences in his book Syntactic Structures and posited that only the first sentence is grammatical while both sentences are nonsensical and likely to never have been uttered before:
(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
(1) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

What Chomsky wants to show us is that grammar is a distinct entity entirely unrelated to semantics (on which pragmatics rest) or statistic approximation. A sentence could be a semantical train wreck and still grammatical and a phrase which has never been uttered before could be entirely grammatical ("there appears to be no particular relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness").

Granted, not everyone agrees with Chomsky and I'm not here to start an argument about grammar, I just so happened to read the above passage in Syntactic Structure some time ago and it was fresh in my memory : )

vix86 Wrote:I once read or had a question (don't recall which) about a word modifying another and someone (guess it wasn't me) was confused how an adverb could do that. Someone considerably replied stating that Japanese doesn't really have adverbs in the same way English does and what we think of as "adverbs" in Japanese still function as nouns and its important to remember that. The person said in beginner classes it helps to teach the words as adverbs for beginner's sakes but its a crutch that hurts you as you get more advanced.

I've never heard this repeated anywhere else but when ever "adverbs" are brought up in a discussion on Japanese grammar; it jumps to mind.

Interesting! Would be great if you could find some more about this : )

I'm not sure it's right to say that adverbs "function as nouns" although it really depends on what you mean by "adverb". There's a constant problem that arises from using these grammatical words that were originally used to describe Latin, then borrowed to describe English, then borrowed from there to describe Japanese. The issue is whether the term "adverb" refers to some syntactical Japanese category, or more vaguely to anything that's an adverb in English.

I suppose that maybe there are no such things as universal grammatical categories. I wonder what differences there are between English adverbs and the category of words we refer to as 副詞!

副詞 does need to broken down to other parts of speech.
You have your adjectival adverbs that come from the 連用形.
You have adverbial gerunds like 歩いて.
You have 擬声語.
The numerous adverbs that are etymologically nouns, but they share certain syntactical limitations when used as adverbs, particularly the usage of particles.

There really needs to be a restructuring of what constitutes the Japanese parts of speech for sure. It may not be possible. What would we do with attributives. The タル形容動詞 are typically no longer considered a separate class despite the fact that they still possess the Shuushikei, Rentaikei, Izenkei, and Meireikei. The Mizenkei continues to exist if you use ず.

This is becoming an interesting thread. When people get bored of the current topic, we will just alternate to something else.

Fleskmos Wrote:I disagree with this definition a bit. For example, Noam Chomsky presented the following two sentences in his book Syntactic Structures and posited that only the first sentence is grammatical while both sentences are nonsensical and likely to never have been uttered before:
(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
(1) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

But is this not still pragmatics. I believe it was stated earlier. Grammar is really nothing more than the agreed upon conventions in a language. There is no rhyme or reason why one thing is grammatical and the other isn't save for the fact that through pragmatics (ie: something being repeated over and over in the same sort of situation and systematized over time). #1 comes out sounding like a sentence because of the syntax of English, the words fit properly into English sentence syntax. How did syntax get set out? Not by some god or the laws of the universe, but by people speaking it in that system (though really its derived from earlier and earlier languages).

Its the same reason why a word that traditionally has no meaning or maybe even has another meaning (ie: Part of speech), can be changed via slang and fit perfectly in the daily language. With more and more people hearing the word used a certain way it gains a meaning in the context and becomes "grammatical." This is pragmatics.

Quote:Interesting! Would be great if you could find some more about this : )

Pretty sure it was yudantaiteki that I heard state it before, now that I think about it more and see his posts.

vix86 Wrote:But is this not still pragmatics. I believe it was stated earlier. Grammar is really nothing more than the agreed upon conventions in a language. There is no rhyme or reason why one thing is grammatical and the other isn't save for the fact that through pragmatics (ie: something being repeated over and over in the same sort of situation and systematized over time). #1 comes out sounding like a sentence because of the syntax of English, the words fit properly into English sentence syntax. How did syntax get set out? Not by some god or the laws of the universe, but by people speaking it in that system (though really its derived from earlier and earlier languages).

Its the same reason why a word that traditionally has no meaning or maybe even has another meaning (ie: Part of speech), can be changed via slang and fit perfectly in the daily language. With more and more people hearing the word used a certain way it gains a meaning in the context and becomes "grammatical." This is pragmatics.

Pragmatics is mainly concerned with meaning related to context but Chomsky would argue that our grammar is entirely separated from any notion of meaning.

I agree with you that grammar is shaped by usage over time but I think that it is concerned with properties of words rather than their meanings. After all, a completely meaningless sentence could still be grammatical. In that sense, I think that it might be circular to use pragmatics to define grammar.

Linguistics usually separates "syntax" and "pragmatics"; they're not 100% separable but syntax does not associate with meaning as much as pragmatics does. I think the difference is useful -- syntax tells you that you use が with 食べたい (or を); pragmatics tells you that you can't use 食べたい with other people unless you qualify it.

[Zgarbas]

Errr...
Wouldn't syntax be the one who says that 食べたい is a verbal (phrase?) acting as an adjective, and semantics the one who states which particles to use with it?

imabi Wrote:wall of terms

this is completely offtopic but your site definitely needs a place where you explain what all these terms are. Reading the lessons in it was nigh-nonsensical because of them. (really cool that you know these things btw)


Somewhat ontopic, I absolutely adore the onomatopoeic adverbs <3. They're just so adorable. I could never actually use them IRL because it would be embarrassing, though...

yudantaiteki Wrote:Linguistics usually separates "syntax" and "pragmatics"; they're not 100% separable but syntax does not associate with meaning as much as pragmatics does. I think the difference is useful -- syntax tells you that you use が with 食べたい (or を); pragmatics tells you that you can't use 食べたい with other people unless you qualify it.

Thank you for the clarification! I think you can actually use the desiderative -たい form with other people in some special cases though. I've come across the example of a person writing a novel and describing a character in the book. In that case, -たい would be more appropriate than for instance -たがる (unless of course the character is being described from the perspective of another character). The distinction I've been taught is that you cannot use -たい unless you have direct access to the state of mind of the person you're describing. The Japanese language really is a curious and interesting thing!

Zgarbas Wrote:Errr...
Wouldn't syntax be the one who says that 食べたい is a verbal (phrase?) acting as an adjective, and semantics the one who states which particles to use with it?

imabi Wrote:wall of terms

this is completely offtopic but your site definitely needs a place where you explain what all these terms are. Reading the lessons in it was nigh-nonsensical because of them. (really cool that you know these things btw)


Somewhat ontopic, I absolutely adore the onomatopoeic adverbs <3. They're just so adorable. I could never actually use them IRL because it would be embarrassing, though...

Actually, any complicated term has a link to the definition or the definition there. It may not have been as integrated as it is now when you lasted looked at it. I continue to make things easier because I know some things is simply the terminology that turns people off.

Quote:How did syntax get set out? Not by some god or the laws of the universe, but by people speaking it in that system

Chomsky-based linguistics would say otherwise. Not that it's god or the laws of the universe, but the actual structure of the human brain -- there are some grammatical constraints that seem to apply across all languages, and these things aren't arbitrary; they're based on the underlying phrase structure of the sentence. It's hard to imagine that languages could be so wildly divergent in some respects and so tightly constrained in others, unless there were some underlying logic behind that.

For example, "What did you go home because you needed to do?" is ungrammatical. There aren't any pragmatic reasons for this; the phrase can be interpreted. It's because the "because" creates an adjunct clause ("You needed to do X") and wh-movement out of an adjunct clause isn't allowed. Furthermore, it's not allowed in any language that has movement of question words.

Wouldn't just a comma after what fix it though?

How so? I can imagine a grammatical sentence like "What, did you go home because you needed to wash your hair?" or "What, did you go home because you have work in the morning?" but in both those cases "you needed to wash your hair" and "you have work in the morning" can stand on their own. "Do" needs an object.

Furthermore, those examples wouldn't be the same structurally -- in those sentences, "what" is more like an interjection than a question word. If I say, "I went home because I needed to do something," you couldn't that around and say "What did you go home because you needed to do?"

Fillanzea Wrote:"What did you go home because you needed to do?"

I could swear I've heard that sentence used as an example before! Did you read it somewhere or is my head just playing a trick on me?

It's an example in Wikipedia under Wh-movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wh-movement

It's been a while since I had a class in syntax, it's hard for me to think up examples on the fly!

The sentences sound fine to me. Lol