な directly after a noun (not a な-adjective)

Question

While reading a grammar book, I read the following explanation of な

な na, a masculine ne

Both sexes use ne, but male speakers often use na instead. There are other uses of na common to both genders, but it's mostly masculine to use it as the equivalent of a rhetorical tag question that expects or solicits agreement. One important difference: na cannot be used directly after a noun the way ne is used in the example 「まあ、ふきのとう。春ねえ。」 whether as an exclamation or as a tag question/request for confirmation.

Why can't な be used directly after a common, non-な-adjective noun without declarative だ like ね? What would the meaning be if it were? For example, if a Japanese speaker read「まあ、ふきのとう。春なあ」how would the interpretation change?

Edit: わ, ぞ, and ぜ also require the declarative だ at the end of noun-type sentences. Why?

Answer 1

Whether or not you need だ/です between a noun and a sentence-end particle depends on the choice of the particle. Unfortunately, you have to memorize which requires だ/です. Anyway, each combination has its own "feeling", and you have to read lots of Japanese text to familiarize yourself. That said, it's good to know だ itself tends to have a bit masculine or blunt overtone.

よ and ね work without だ, but adding だ makes it sound more masculine.

• 春よ。: highly feminine
• 春ですよ。: neutral but slightly feminine, polite
• 春だよ。: relatively masculine or tomboyish
• 春ね。: feminine (sounds like a mom speaking to her child)
• 春ですね。: neutral, formal
• 春だね。: relatively masculine (sounds like a dad speaking to his child)

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な, わ, ぜ and ぞ require だ or です after the noun.

• ×春わ。 (ungrammatical)
• △春ですわ。: extremely feminine (sounds like a fictional noble girl)
• 春だわ。: highly feminine
• ×春ぜ。 (ungrammatical)
• △春ですぜ。: highly masculine (sounds like a rough guy trying to be polite)
• △春だぜ。: highly masculine (sounds like a heroic boy in a shonen manga)
• ×春な。 (ungrammatical, although Yotsuba uses this a lot. It also makes sense when it works like a topic particle, e.g., お前なぁ…)
• △春ですな。: masculine (sounds like an elderly pompous butler, novelist, etc.)
• 春だな。: masculine
• ×春ぞ。 (ungrammatical, but rare archaic copula-like ぞ exists, e.g. 我は魔王ぞ)
• △春ですぞ。: masculine (sounds like a comical old man)
• 春だぞ。: masculine or tomboyish

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さ/や/じゃ works like a copula themselves.

• 春さ。: masculine or tomboyish, dialectal
• ×春ですさ。 (ungrammatical)
• ×春ださ。 (ungrammatical)
• 春や。: masculine, dialectal
• ×春ですや。 (ungrammatical)
• ×春だや。 (ungrammatical)

(× indicates ungrammatical. △ indicates the expression is part of a role language and used only by a certain category of people in fictional works.)

Na-adjectives like 元気 follow the same pattern. Explanatory-の/ん works basically in the same way (because の/ん is a formal noun), but some are strongly associated with either one of の and ん.

Answer 2

I disagree with the grammar book. Both な and ね are used regularly, but ね is more common because な is harsher. I often hear な on the golf course or at drinking parties when with predominantly or exclusively men:

• すげえショットな！
• ビールかハイボールしかない？ビールな。

I'd translate these as close-to English swearing, like this;

• Nice f***in' shot boy!
• Beer or highball? F***, beer man.

Use of ね is way more polite, so can't be used directly in place of な in the first sentence above: 「すげえショットね」sounds off-balance, because 「すげえ」and 「ね」do not match. To use ね you'd have to soften すげえ to すごい to produce 「すごいショットね」which is perfectly acceptable.

Although not direct evidence for my argument, here are Google extact-phrase hit counts for a few different patterns:

• すごいね 4,320,000 results (soft + soft = balanced) often used
• すげえな 1,410,000 results (harsh + harsh = balanced) used less often because it is harsh
• すげえね 21,700 results (harsh + soft = unbalanced) almost never used

(Edit)Also searched NWJC(国語研日本語ウェブコーパス)

• すごいね 86088 results
• すげえな 10535 results
• すげえね 118 results

(Note that I've deliberately omitted 「すごいな」results because here な can be used its usual adjective sense, treating すごい as a な adjective as in 「すごいなこと」)

These Google search results do not directly relate to your question, because they pertain to the adjective すごい and not to nouns, but there is no single noun that I can think of that will yield a large enough hit number on Google search to make a similar comparison with nouns. Even more problematic is that it's impossible to filter out results for which な is used as a な adjective.

My sense is that this issue is related to usage difference between だ and です. だ is clearly much more informal, and male speakers use it much more often than female speakers. Similar to my な and ね argument above, だ can't be mixed with polite forms. For example: 「美味しゅうです」is OK, 「美味しゅうだ」is cringingly bad.

So I suspect that the grammar book suggests that な can't be used after nouns only because this use is highly informal. It is easy to go astray when trying to use な after a noun, either through poor sentence balance, or through use inappropriate social contexts (i.e. it sounds informal at best, and can be highly impolite, close to swearing in certain contexts).