In grammar

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

, an attributive verb is a verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

 which modifies (gives the attributes of) a noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

 as an attributive, rather than expressing an independent idea as a predicate

Predicate (grammar)

There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. Traditional grammar tends to view a predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies. The other understanding of predicates is inspired from work in predicate calculus...

.

In English, verbs may be attributive as participle

Participle

In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...

s or as infinitive

Infinitive

In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives...

s: 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.

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

Japanese

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

For example, in Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, predicative verbs come at the end of the clause, after the nouns, while attributive verbs come before the noun. These are equivalent to relative clause

Relative clause

A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...

s in English; Japanese does not have relative pronoun

Relative pronoun

A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...

s 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

Grammatical aspect

In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...

, as here, and grammatical polarity

Grammatical polarity

Grammatical polarity is the distinction of affirmative and negative. In English, grammatical polarity is generally indicated by the presence or absence of the modifier not, which negates the statement. Many other languages contain similar modifiers: Italian and Interlingua have non, Spanish has...

, 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

Korean language

Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

 and Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

. The following examples illustrate the difference:

Classical Japanese:

• hito arukiki - a person walked
• arukishi hito - the person who walked

Turkish:

• Adam şiir okur "The man reads poetry."
• Şiir okuyan adam "The man who reads poetry."

Notice that all of these languages have a verb-final word order

Word order

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...

, and that none of them have relative pronouns. They also do not have a clear distinction between verbs and adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....

s, as can be seen in Japanese:

• Sora (ga) aoi. "The sky is blue."
• Aoi sora "A blue sky."

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