Japanese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Japanese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have read that great answer about i-adjectives being predicates. How does it reflect in questions?
Say, I have a dialogue:
— Is your city a beautiful one?
— Yes, it is.
— Is it big?
— Yes, it is.
As I imagine, a conversation would be something like:
—あなたの町はきれいですか。
—はい、そうです。
—あなたの町は大きいですか。
—はい、そうです。
Is it possible to change the third phrase to something shorter, like 大きいですか or even 大きいか? Would this still be polite?
What would a similar short question look like with the na-adjective きれい?
The two people already know what they are talking about, so they can safely omit the subject and say "大きいですか?" or "綺麗ですか?". But that's all you can do safely.
"大きいか?" is a grammatical question, but it always sounds very blunt and unfriendly. This sounds almost like you are a stubborn dwarf blacksmith living alone in a cave. It's inappropriate not only in polite speech but also in ordinary informal conversations.
On the other hand, the dictionary form "大きい?" could mean "(Is it / Did you say) big?" on its own. This is common, but sounds fairly informal. In your example conversation, there is no good reason to omit ですか in the second question.
