What is a 連体詞?

Yesterday, I was reviewing the sections I am writing on adjectives for the grammar book. In the book, I sometimes end with To go further… subsections. Those are meant for more intermediate or advanced students of grammar and often contain either some etymology or information on a deeper issue related to the section.

This specific subsection was discussing adjectives that seem to have two different forms: one as an い-adjective, one as a な-adjective. In there, I had given two examples: 大き- and 小さ-. Now the more common forms are of course 大きい and 小さい, but still 大きな and 小さな do exist.

The problem is that neither of these happens to be a な-adjective. Or rather, they are really “only な-adjectives”, and almost nothing else. After all, you can’t really say 小さに can you? Now, alright, you can say 大きに in 関西弁, but neither of these are common. You also can’t say 大きだ or 小さだ. This is what I mean by they are really “only な-adjectives”.

A bit more technically, we say that the bases of these words have all mostly collapsed except for the 連体形, the attributive base that is used to attach to nouns. If we use modern grammatical categories, neither of these are actually な-adjectives, they are something else. That something else is called a rentaishi (in Japanese, 連体詞). In this article, Seth from IMABI describes them as such:

連体詞 are simply adjectival words that are stuck in the 連体形 or are modifier phrases treated as a single unit. There are also 連体詞 that come from two defunct classes of 形容動詞: ナル形容動詞 and タル形容動詞, which still possess functional 連用形, に and と respectively. They can be viewed as adjectives with just dormant bases.

And one common example of a 連体詞 that still has a conjunctive base (in Japanese, 連用形) is 新た-. The usual way to use it is in the attributive as 新たな, but it can also be used as 新たに. That’s the 連用形. Since I was still a bit confused, I went on Wikipedia.

The article on 連体詞 was pretty good, but it listed a very wide variety of constructs: こそあど goodness, genitive が (e.g. 我が-), our な- examples from before, and even stuff like こういう. So now, I got confused again. Neither 我が nor こういう looked liked special kinds of adjectives to me, so I did what I always do when I’m confused: I asked Japanese Stackexchange for clarification, and, ideally, some history behind the term 連体詞 itself.

In just a few hours, I had a very detailed explanation discussing why these various examples were considered 連体詞.

The best way to understand it is as a kind of miscellaneous attributive grammatical category, where the things in there are fossilized set phrases or forms that are now used only attributively. In other words, their past grammatical function (genitive particle for が and の, verb for いう, etc.) are considered to be irrelevant and what matters is how these words are actually used.

I find that pretty cool. I guess even grammarians sometimes can just look at stuff and go “I don’t know man, some kinda adjective or whatever”. Another thing that’s cool is that this kind of category does not really exist as such in other languages, because the way the bases work in Japanese is pretty different from other languages.

For some reason, I feel like 連体詞 are never really discussed in English resources on Japanese grammar. Seth does discuss it, but even he told me that he considers this article on 連体詞 a “stub of a lesson”.

I guess part of the issue is that for most of these examples, it’s pretty hard to get it wrong since they’re either very specific or very common. But I could see people writing ?新ただ*, so maybe it is worth adding a section on that in my grammar book.

* So, a few hours after I shared this article, someone mentioned that this form does exist. It’s in a rather specific set phrase though (記憶に新ただ). Should we consider it as a fully-fledged な-adjective?