* "The Japanese language does not have words that function as adjectives in a syntactic sense"

Question

※ _{This (titular) assertion is questionable, so I'm (1) putting it in quotes, and (2) placing an asterisk in front of it.}

The following page starts with this assertion, which I had not heard before :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_equivalents_of_adjectives

The Japanese language does not have words that function as adjectives in a syntactic sense – that is to say that tree diagrams of Japanese sentences can be constructed without employing adjective phrases. [citation needed]

Nevertheless, there are words that function as adjectives in a semantic sense.

[citation needed] ! ! !

Is this a commonly heard notion?

For example :

• 立派で赤い花
• 背が高く赤い花が立派なこの植物の名前を教えてください。

It's not obvious how Parse Trees of these strings (above) would be any different from Parse Trees of English strings of similar meanings.

–- that is to say, a tree diagram (or a parse tree) of the latter Japanese string (the sentence) seems like it would be a great example to illustrate [adjective phrases] in Japanese.

This Jp wikipedia page doesn't have anything on it: Wikipedia 形容詞

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Essentially, this is saying that syntactically adjectives work the same as verbs. For example:

Japanese:

• 食べる犬
• 犬が食べる
• 赤い犬
• 犬が赤い

English:

• The dog that eats
• The dog eats
• The red dog
• The dog is red

Note that in English you can't say "The that eats dog", "The dog red", "The dog that red" etc. You have to construct the sentences differently depending on whether you're describing the dog with a verb or adjective. This isn't the case in Japanese. If the only thing you knew about a word was how it fit into a sentence, you couldn't tell if it was a verb or an adjective -- but you could in English, because of the extra "that"s and "is"es. That's the argument.

(Note that adjectives do have different morphology, i.e. inflection, than verbs. That isn't what Wikipedia is talking about.)