Attributive verb

In grammar, an attributive verb is a verb which modifies (gives the attributes of) a noun as an attributive, rather than expressing an independent idea as a predicate.

In English, verbs may be attributive as participles or as infinitives: a barking dog; a hand-fed turkey; uneaten food; a place to eat. It is uncommon for verbs to be used in their root form, and then only in the negative: a no-go area, no-fly zone or list, non-stick pan, no-lose situation, no-rinse shampoo, no-bake cookies.[1]

However, many other languages allow regular verbs to be attributive.

Japanese

Further information: 連体形

Japanese allows regular verbs to be attributive, and the following characteristics of Japanese are common among verb-final languages.

For example, in Japanese, predicative verbs come at the end of the clause, after the nouns, while attributive verbs come before the noun. These are equivalent to relative clauses in English; Japanese does not have relative pronouns like "who", "which", or "when":

昨日 あの 人 歩いた。
Kinō ano hito aruita.
yesterday that person walked
"That person walked yesterday."
あの 昨日 歩いた 人。
Ano kinō aruita hito.
that yesterday walked person
"That person who walked yesterday."

In prescriptive speech the particle ga would appear after the subject: Kinō ano hito ga aruita. However, this it is often omitted as here in conversation.

Japanese attributive verbs inflect for grammatical aspect, as here, and grammatical polarity, but not commonly for politeness. For example, the polite form of hito ga aruita is hito ga arukimashita, but the form arukimashita hito is not common (felt to be too polite and paraphrastic), though it is grammatically correct. Except for this, modern Japanese verbs have the same form whether predicative or attributive. (The only exception is the copula, which is da or desu when used predicatively and na when used attributively.) Historically, however, these had been separate forms. This is still the case in languages such as Korean and Turkish. The following examples illustrate the difference:

Classical Japanese:

Turkish:

Notice that all of these languages have a verb-final word order, and that none of them have relative pronouns. They also do not have a clear distinction between verbs and adjectives, as can be seen in Japanese:

In Japanese, aoi "blue" is effectively a descriptive verb rather than an adjective.

See also

References

  1. ^ Although some of these words could arguably be nouns, that is not the case with fly, stick, lose, bake. Compare no-flight zone, no-loss guarantee, which use attributive nouns. (Language Log No what zone?)