Japanese Grammar - Word Classification

Word Classification

In linguistics generally, words and affixes are often classified into two major word categories: lexical words, those that refer to the world outside of a discourse, and function words—also including fragments of words—which help to build the sentence in accordance with the grammar rules of the language. Lexical words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and sometimes prepositions and postpositions, while grammatical words or word parts include everything else. The native tradition in Japanese grammar scholarship seems to concur in this view of classification. This native Japanese tradition uses the terminology jiritsugo (自立語), "independent words", for words having lexical meaning, and fuzokugo (付属語), "ancillary words", for words having a grammatical function.

Classical Japanese had some auxiliary verbs (i.e., they were independent words) which have become grammaticized in modern Japanese as inflectional suffixes, such as the past tense suffix -ta (which might have developed as a contraction of -te ari).

Traditional scholarship proposes a system of word classes differing somewhat from the above mentioned. The "independent" words have the following categories.

katsuyōgo (活用語), word classes which have inflections

dōshi (動詞), verbs,

keiyōshi (形容詞), i-type adjectives.

keiyōdōshi (形容動詞), na-type adjectives

hikatsuyōgo (非活用語) or mukatsuyōgo (無活用語), word classes which do not have inflections

meishi (名詞), nouns

daimeishi (代名詞), pronouns

fukushi (副詞), adverbs

setsuzokushi (接続詞), conjunctions

kandōshi (感動詞), interjections

rentaishi (連体詞), prenominals

Ancillary words also divide into a nonconjugable class, containing grammatical particles (助詞 joshi) and counter words (助数詞 josūshi), and a conjugable class consisting of auxiliary verbs (助動詞 jodōshi). There is not wide agreement among linguists as to the English translations of the above terms.