The newsletter is online which means there must be a podcast:

It’s an even month which means I’m revisiting past topics, which this month is my Japan Times article on incomplete sentences from May 2016. This is one of my favorites. I go through all the examples on the podcast.

At the very end of the newsletter this month I touch upon an interesting topic which is that English and Japanese seem to have different ways of referring to incompleteness when it comes to sentences.

English uses the following:

incomplete sentence

This gets rendered into Japanese as 不完全な文 (fukanzen na bun).

Based on what I’m seeing online, Japanese uses:

不完全な述語 (fukanzen na jutsugo)

This gets rendered into English as “incomplete predicates.”

And I think it’s interesting to note that in the article I mention in the newsletter, Naoko Taguchi refers to them as “incomplete utterances,” avoiding the sentence/predicate decision entirely, which I think may be more of a result of her focus on the spoken language. At any rate, for the blog, I thought I’d take a quick look at what exactly constitutes a Japanese 述語 (jutsugo, “predicate”).

I wrote about Japanese grammatical terms in Japanese back in October 2021 over on the old newsletter site, so I guess technically I’m looking back at two articles today. Unfortunately my copy of 日本語の文法　入門 (Nihongo bunpō nyūmon) by Murata Mizue (you can actually preview a good bit of it over on Google Books), the book I referred to for that newsletter, didn’t make it over to Japan with me this time.

Fortunately for me there was a very cheap copy available on Mercari, and I picked it up the other day. Since first reading this book, I’ve spent more time reading about Japanese grammar in Japanese, so I feel confident saying this book is one of the clearest and easiest to understand and at the same time presents all the complexities of Japanese grammar. I highly recommend it.

So what does this book say about 述語?

I do feel like predicates can’t be captured simply, which is evident if you look at the Japanese Wikipedia entry for 述語. So unfortunately there’s not one section with a super clear definition. I did manage to find two sentences near the beginning that sum up what’s going on:

述語は文を締めくくる大切な要素であり、それには、動詞、形容詞のほかに、「名詞＋判定詞（だ／である／です）」があります。 (30)

Jutsugo are an important element that conclude a sentence and include verbs and adjectives as well as nouns combined with hanteishi (copula) (da/de aru/desu).

So essentially, a predicate is a verb, adjective, or noun + 判定詞 that come at the end of a sentence.

Murata offers this summary as well:

文は、述語の種類によって、動詞文（動詞述語文）、形容詞文（形容詞述語文）、名詞文（名詞述語文）と呼ばれます。 (30)

Depending on the type of predicate, sentences are referred to as verb sentences (verb-predicate sentences), adjective sentences (adjective-sentence predicates), or noun sentences (noun-predicate sentences).

I think this is an incredibly helpful way to think about Japanese. We all know the important bit comes at the end, but this really puts that into black and white. You can only have three types of Japanese sentences, and they are divided up based on the predicate (what comes at the end).

Although I guess an incomplete sentence/predicate is the fourth type of sentence you can have, and as I go over in the podcast, there are a ton of varieties. I’d like to write about them and about predicates in further detail at some point in the future.