So-called の-adjectives - how does の *really* work?

Question

Ok, so there seems to be some controversy over whether we can really say that there are 'の-adjectives', or whether we simply use a noun in an "attributive" way (a term which I don't actually really understand). But it's clear that there's something interesting going on here, a deviation from the "default" understanding of の (as marking the genitive case), and I'd like some clarification.

Let's look at what seems to be for whatever the classical example:

○　「永遠の愛」 "eternal love"

It's clear that we can't just apply the pattern "X の Y ⇔ Y of X" here*. But what is really going on? How do we know that the usual pattern doesn't apply here - is it contextual? A matter of set-phrasing? Is it because 永遠, being abstract, would need to be reified to be used in the normal way?

* It's worth noting that the pattern doesn't even hold in English here, which does seem to be a special case.

"love of eternity" - a strange thing to talk about, but in English, reification is implicit so this works just as well as "love of gold".

But what is more strange is that with "love" in particular, this doesn't have the normal genitive-case meaning - an English speaker parses "love of gold" not as the love which is expressed by gold, but love such that gold is the thing that is loved. Similarly for "eternity", following the same role.

And it doesn't even work the same way with similar words... * "desire/lust of gold" - should be "desire/lust for gold". But regardless, a love which is eternal is not the same thing as a love which is expressed by (belongs to, really; but in what other sense can love be possessed than by expressing it?) eternity-seen-as-an-entity, which would be the default interpretation of the pattern.

What happens in Japanese with that example? 「金の愛」 - grammatical? How would it be interpreted? How about with explicit reification (「金のことの愛」・「金のものの愛」）？

And how literal is it to translate 「永遠の」 as "eternal"? Can we describe what's going on here more pedantically? What determines our ability to use a noun this way with の?

And am I getting too philosophical? :)

Answer 1

As I understand it, the term “no-adjective” simply means “nouns which are typically translated to adjectives in English and other languages.” If we treat Japanese as a language in its own right, distinguishing them from nouns as different parts-of-speech is completely artificial.

The particle の makes a modifier of a noun. The exact relationship between the modifier and the modified noun can be almost anything; Daijisen lists fourteen relationships such as ownership, belonging, location of existence, location of action, time, and so on, and one of them is “attribute and condition.”

[瀕死]{ひんし}の[重傷]{じゅうしょう} a life-threatening injury
[縦]{たて}じまのシャツ a shirt with vertical stripes

(The examples are from Daijisen, the English translation of the first example is by FumbleFingers on english.stackexchange.com, and the translation of the second example is by me.)

The の in 永遠の愛 is the same thing. The noun [永遠]{えいえん} (eternity) is turned to a modifier 永遠の, and it describes an attribute of the love.

Answer 2

Two things to consider here I feel. The first one is analysing “〜の” as a genitive per sē rather than a generic adnominal marker. It should be noted that “〜の" can follow many more things than nouns, as “〜だ” can and it's commonly analysed as one of the two adnominal forms of “〜だ" the other being “〜な”. Indeed, we can also for instance say:

• “食べただけの人” - “A person who merely ate”
• “処刑するほどの罪” - “A crime worthy of execution”
• “破壊神がベルス様の宇宙” - “The universe where Lord Beerus is the destroyer god”, note how here “〜の” follows an entire clause that has it's own subject, really showing how it's an adnominal form of “〜だ”
• “子供の社長” - Typically interpreted as “a child company head” not “the company head of a child”

So it would be a mistake to begin with to assume that it's the non-genitive function of “〜の” that gives rise to the idea of “no-adjectives”. Some might however argue that it's merely a matter of translating it to adjectives in English and that they are nouns. That I don't agree with; they seem to grammatically behave as adjectives in Japanese. To use the common example of “病気の人”. The major thing that's going on here is that “病気” can be modified by adverbs. We can for instance say “少し病気の人". We can't say “少し子供の社長” This sounds as odd as “a company head who is slightly child”. “slightly child” does not make sense and neither does “少し子供”. “子供” is after all a noun, not an adjective, and it thus cannot be modified by an adverb and we need something like “少し子供っぽい”, but “病気” seems to be able to function as both a noun and an adjective.

Answer 3

The notion of 'no-adjectives' was conceived by Mio Isago in 1942; 三尾砂、話し言葉の文法. I would like to say it is 'ill-conceived' but Mio was writing at a time when Japanese linguistics was still in its infancy. Still, considering he was positing a category that doesn't even exist in traditional Japanese grammar, it is puzzling. The impetus may have come from pedagogy, the need to teach Japanese to foreigners, that was probably starting to expand. The misconception was taken up many years later by, for example, 森田千草 in 2010 ('The Internal Structure of Adjectives in Japanese'), and it seems some modern dictionaries, and dictionaries of grammar, for foreigners, teach it.

The idea is based on the lack of understanding of Japanese syntax in relation to the construction of NのN.

の is the form of the copula だ, when it is adnominalized (in Japanese, 修飾語化?). In English, we might have

An ancient mariner

and we can derive this from an underlying

The mariner is ancient.

Similarly, in Japanese, we can posit this derivation:

老齢の水夫　←　水夫は老齢だ

but whereas in a normal relativization, the verb doesn't change form, e.g.,

鈴木さんはうそをつく　➞　うそをつく鈴木さん

だ obligatorily changes to の

水夫は老齢だ　➞　老齢だ水夫　➞　老齢の水夫

This is fine for an underlying sentence where the copula is just that, 'is'. But we know that だ can act as a substitute for a whole predicate (奥津敬一郎 (1978) 「ボクハウナギダ」の文法).

Okutsu's analysis of his well-known sentence, 僕はうなぎだ, is:

僕はうなぎ[を注文した]

where だ is substituted for the bracketed material. This substitution of だ for part of a predicate is called だによる述部代用化, translated as 'propredication' in English.

A canonical example of a 'no-adjective' is 瀕死. The frequently found expression,

瀕死の重傷, 'a fatal wound'

in fact has an underlying structure like

重傷は瀕死[を引き起こした] 'The serious wound has given rise to a near-death state.'

if we make a parallel with Okutsu's analysis, and after だ substitution and relativization:

重症は瀕死だ　➞　瀕死だ重症　➞　瀕死の重傷

What is behind this is well-explained by the linguist John Haig:

'Japanese has a very general process of redundant information deletion which
 deletes information predictable from the linguistic or non-linguistic context.'

(Yes, 瀕死 is a noun: from a medical reseach paper, その他の動物に死亡あるいは瀕死は認められなかった. And 瀕死 means '(the state of being) near death', not 'fatal' which is 致命.)

In the construction NのN, where we do not have with a genitive (東京の名所, "Tokyo's sights"), or の marking the subject of a relative clause (ga-no conversion), then we have a relative clause made from an underlying sentence, which has an adjective-like function.