Attributive verb

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":

::"That person walked yesterday."

::"That person who walked yesterday."

(In textbooks, the particle "ga" often appears after the subject: "Kinou ano hito ga aruita." However, "ga" is frequently omitted 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 arukimasita," but one cannot say "*arukimasita 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:

*"Şiir okur." "S/he reads a poem."
*"Okan şiir" "a poem which s/he reads"

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.

ee also

*Attributive adjective
*Attributive noun