Attributive verb
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In grammar, an attributive verb is a verb which modifies (gives the attributes of) a noun, rather than expressing an independent idea as a predicate.
In English, verbs may only be attributive as participles: the walking man; a walked dog; uneaten food.
However, many other languages allow regular verbs to be attributive. For example, in Japanese, predicative verbs come at the end of the clause, after the nouns, while attributive verbs come before the noun. These are equivalent to relative clauses in English; Japanese does not have relative pronouns like "who", "which", or "when":
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Kinō ano hito aruita. yesterday that person walked
- "That person walked yesterday."
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Ano kinō aruita hito. that yesterday walked person
- "That person who walked yesterday."
In prescriptive speech the particle ga would appear after the subject: Kinō ano hito ga aruita. However, this it is frequently omitted as here in conversation.
Japanese attributive verbs inflect for grammatical aspect, as here, and grammatical polarity, but not for politeness. For example, the polite form of hito aruita is hito arukimashita, but one cannot say *arukimashita hito. Except for this, Japanese verbs have the same form whether predicative or attributive. Historically, however, these had been separate forms. This is still the case in languages such as Korean and Turkish. The following examples illustrate the difference in Turkish:
- Adam şiir okur "The man reads poetry."
- Şiir okuyan adam "The man who reads poetry."
Notice that all of these languages have a verb-final word order, and that none of them have relative pronouns. They also do not have a clear distinction between verbs and adjectives, as can be seen in Japanese:
- Sora (ga) aoi. "The sky is blue."
- Aoi sora "A blue sky."
In Japanese, aoi "blue" is effectively a descriptive verb rather than an adjective.
All of these characteristics are common among verb-final languages.
