My copy of the 2nd edition of A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (released earlier this month) arrived in the mail today, so I thought that I'd share a couple of new insights from the revised edition.
Before I begin, this will not be a comprehensive review of the 2nd edition, nor a comparison of 1st and 2nd; there's way too much to compare and contrast to do that justice right now. My initial impression is that most entries were clarified or slightly expanded with additional examples.
There are, however, two completely new entries that stick out. (As in the 1st edition, the entries are listed under their Hepburn romanization. I'll use hiragana/kanji except when quoting from running English text in the book.)
だ (is not a copula)
New to the 2nd edition is an entry on だ. In the 1st edition, だ was covered primarily under the は～だ entry, which still exists but is now more focused on topics like うなぎ文 and ellipsis in は～だ sentences. The standalone entry directly addresses what だ is ("an auxiliary that is attached to a non-conjugational word to indicate the tense and the politeness level") and clarifies that
Da and its conjugated forms are commonly considered to be a copula and to carry the meaning of "be." However, this view is questionable because da does not appear in various grammatical constructions as noted in Note 3; nevertheless, the meaning "be" is maintained in these constructions. In addition, da does not occur with i-adjectives while desu does[.]
The "Note 3" referenced above spends multiple pages extensively analyzing the cases in which だ does and does not appear. There is way too much here even to attempt to summarize adequately in a Reddit post, but here's one specific subcase:
- だ usually does not appear in subordinate clauses: 専攻がコンピューター工学なら… (no だ)
- except that と requires it to avoid ambiguity:
- 木村先生が私たちの先生だと困る。 -> We'll be in trouble if Prof. Kimura is our teacher.
- 木村先生が私たちの先生と困る。 -> Prof. Kimura will be in trouble with our teacher.
- … and it can't be omitted before から, meaning that から doesn't create as high a degree of subordination as other particles do.
The 1st edition unequivocably went with the prevailing view of academic linguists in the 1980s that だ was a copula. The new analysis comes directly from, and is essentially a summary of, Michio Tsutsui's own 2006 paper "The Japanese Copula Revisited: Is da a Copula?", which is a fascinating read in its own right (and further addresses the case of である, which is beyond the scope of the Basic volume).
なる (forms a passive/causative pair with する)
Also new to this edition is a standalone entry on なる, which is welcome, given the importance of that verb in Japanese. 1st edition had covered certain expressions that contain なる, but not なる itself.
One key insight in this entry (one which u/DokugoHikken might agree with, since he has mentioned in various daily threads the importance of the passive/causative dichotomy in Japanese):
The relation between suru5 and naru can also be viewed from the viewpoint of causative and passive. That is, sentences involving suru5 basically carry a causative meaning (i.e., X causes Y to change the state of Y), while sentences involving naru carry a passive meaning in some situations[.]
A pair of sentences given to illustrate this point:
- 学校は野山を停学にした。 (The school suspended Noyama. — lit., The school made Noyama suspended from school.)
- 野山は停学になった。 (Noyama got suspended from school. — lit., Noyama became suspended from school.)
Anyway, I just wanted to share these couple of points from the new edition of A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. I have not read through the whole thing yet, but I want to. The References section in the back lists many sources that postdate the first edition, so I'm sure that there are new insights elsewhere in the book.
by tkdtkd117