Inflectional Morphemes: Stems

Terminology. This analysis follows the general pattern of Bernard Bloch's study of Japanese inflection. There are some differences, since the primary aim of this analysis is a study of the formal morphs and the morpheme classes to which they belong, rather than the presentation of paradigmatic categories. The terms used by Bloch are adopted here without definition. For Bloch's terms past and non-past, I use perfect and imperfect respectively; Bloch's conditional category is treated as the perfect provisional. The imperative is kept morphemically distinct from the alternant imperative which occurs with vowel verbs and the polite verb -mas.u; I call these the first and second imperative respectively. The alternant presumptive which occurs only with negative adjectives I call the second presumptive. There is also an alternant adjective gerund ending -ku.t.t.e which I treat as the regular gerund ending -ku.t.e + the intensive morpheme //q// (§12.3, §12.5). I consider the gerund and the alternative form to include the aspect morpheme, but I do not equate the remainder of each form with any of the forms that lack the aspect morpheme, such as the infinitive and the imperative, since this would be difficult to justify in terms of meaning.