68716
い-adjectives negate in the following way.

> 「大{おお}きい」→「大きくない」

How I've always interpreted process is that we're basically changing the
adjective 「大きい」 into the adverb form 「大きく」 and then tacking on 「ない」, which is
itself an adjective describing negation.

One thing that seems weird is of course that「ない」is an adjective and not a
verb, so why would our adjective need to be changed into an adverb first?
Perhaps it is because in context we would see 「ないです」, which itself functions
as a verb? So perhaps in the sentence 「大きくないです」, we are seeing an outer
structure outer structure of 「大きく」 and an inner structure of 「ないです」.

Usually, I see 「大きくないです」 romanized as `ookikunai desu` instead of `ookiku
naidesu`, so this makes me doubt my thinking.

Is the way I described above a correct way of interpreting this inflection? If
not, what would be a proper way?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-06-07T00:28:25.570
68709
2019-06-07T04:16:54.843
33505
question
grammar etymology adjectives i-adjectives
Understanding the connection between adverbs and adjective negation
An adverb is used to modify not only a verb but also an adjective, both in
Japanese and in English.

  * **とても** 良い = _very_ good  
(とても and _very_ are adverbs which (almost) exclusively modify an adjective)

  * **酷く** まずい = _terribly_ yucky  
(酷く and _terribly_ are "adverbial forms of adjectives" that modify another
adjective. 酷くてまずい means "terrible, and yucky".)

So I think the ku-form is a natural choice to combine two adjectives. In
Japanese grammatical terms, the ku-form is called 連用形, literally "connect-to-
用言 form", where 用言 roughly means "verbs and adjectives".
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-06-07T04:16:54.843
68716
2019-06-07T04:16:54.843
5010
68709
answer