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In my bilingual dictionary, ばかり is listed as a particle. Yet in a tutorial on ばかり, I came across the following sentence:

車を買ったばかり。

I just bought a car.

What's weird to me is that the sentence ends in a particle (ばかり). How is this grammatical?

  • Is this just a slangy way of saying this sentence?
  • Perhaps ばかり doubles as a noun, and there is an implicit だ (copula) being dropped at the end?
  • ...something else?
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ばかり can work also like a no-adjective (which is a noun), just as はず, ため and so on can. So yes, this is a sentence with an implicit だ/です. The canonical version of this sentence is (私は)車を買ったばかりです or (私は)車を買ったばかりだ.

Since ばかり can work as a no-adjective, you can say this, too:

  • 車を買ったばかりの男
    a man who just bought a car
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