Verbs

Morphological categories

The overall range of inflected categories and forms is not very different between OJ (cf. 3.1.3) and EMJ; the EMJ inventory of forms is shown in Table 8.1.

The greatest change was the loss of the nominal form, e.g. kakaku, akuraku, which was prominent in OJ (see 3.1.3.3). It went out of general use, but was archaically retained in kanbun-kundoku and to some extent in poetry; it also survived in some set expressions, cf. 9.1.7. The OJ uses of the nominal form came to be taken over (a) by nominalizations by nouns such as koto ‘thing’ which increased in use both in abstract nominalizations (‘the fact that …’) and in complement clauses, and (b) by the adnominal form which expanded its use in headless nominalizations; see further 12.6.1 about changes in the use of the adnominal form.

The prohibitive retained only the one pattern shown in Table 8.1, and of the several related optative verb forms, only that in -(a)namu survived in EMJ, with the general sense ‘I wish’. A new optative form in -(a)baya came into use, e.g. kikabaya ‘I wish to hear’, originating in the combination of conditional -(a)ba and the particle ya. The segmental distinction between exclamatory and imperative, e.g. OJ kake versus kakye, was lost, in the course of the merger of OJ Ce and Cye (7.3.2.1). For vowel base verbs, the imperative now generally ended in -yo (which had been optional with some verb classes in OJ, cf. 3.4.5).