Fixedness in Japanese adjectives in conversation:
Toward a new understanding of a lexical (‘part-of-speech’) category

Sandra A. Thompson, UC Santa Barbara (and Tsuyoshi Ono, University of Alberta)

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-à-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.