Abstract
Japanese adjectives have received a fair amount of attention for their intriguing morphological and diachronic properties. Adjectives have also been discussed in the typological literature, largely in terms of their status as a lexical category vis-a-vis nouns and verbs. Very little research has been done, however, on the everyday use of adjectives in Japanese conversation. Based on a substantial corpus of Japanese conversations, we argue in favor of these two claims:
Claim 1. Conversational Japanese strongly favors PREDICATE adjectives over ATTRIBUTIVE adjectives.
Claim 2. Whether predicative or attributive, an understanding of Japanese adjectives in everyday talk involves various facets of FIXEDNESS.
Claim 2a. ATTRIBUTIVE and PREDICATIVE adjectives in Japanese show DIFFERENT TYPES OF FIXEDNESS.
Claim 2b. ONGOING LEXICALIZATION is a prominent feature of Japanese adjective usage.