89019
While reading, I came across the following:

[![img1](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvG9wm.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bvG9wm.jpg)

Translation: Riko and Mai stopped seeing each other gradually.

My question is very similar to [A negative verb conjugated as an
adjective?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/9546/%E8%A8%80%E3%82%8F%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84-vs-%E8%A8%80%E3%82%8F%E3%81%AA%E3%81%8F%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84-a-negative-
verb-conjugated-as-an-adjective). However, I would like to verify if my
reasoning is correct.

Doing some research, from [Essential Japanese
Grammar](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B00B77AKBE) by Masahiro
Tanimori and Eriko Sato, we have:

> There are some auxiliaries and suffixes that create new adjective-like words
> by following other words, and they doubtlessly follow the conjugation and
> derivation patterns of _I_ -adjectives ( _tai_ , _nai_ , and _rashii_ ).

Page 28

The non-past plain negative form of 会う is 会わない, which ends in ない. To obtain
会わなくなりました, we can modify 会わない as follows: assuming 会わない functions as an
adjective, we can conjugate it in its く-form, 会わなく.

From the same book, we have:

> The _ku_ -form of adjectives is made by replacing the final _i_ of the
> adjective in the dictionary form with _ku_. The _ku_ -form of _ii_ 'good' is
> _yoku_. The _ku_ -form can serve as an adverb. Accordingly, it can be used
> with verbs such as _suru_ 'to do' and _naru_ 'to become' to express some
> changes.

Page 29

Because of the above, we can combine 会わなく with なる, 会わなくなる. Finally, we just
change the tense to the past polite form, 会わなくなりました.

会わなく modifies なりました, which is a verb. Therefore, 会わなく is an adverb.

> Adverbs express the manner of the action expressed by the verb in a
> sentence.

Page 36

**Is this correct?**
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-08-23T16:53:00.990
89018
2021-08-23T18:23:51.630
45630
question
grammar adverbs i-adjectives
In the sentence, 「リコとマイは会わなくなりました」, is 会わなくconjugated from 会わない?
Adverbs describe the _manner_ in which something happens. In your example
sentence, there is no _manner_ being described. Rather, the sentence describes
a transition into a particular state of being. (After a number of comments,
perhaps it's just best to jump to the end of this post where I walk through
the traditional Japanese grammatical way of thinking about this. Japanese is
not like Indo-European languages, and so at some point, clinging to Indo-
European grammatical categories can get in the way.)

# Thinking from an Indo-European Perspective

I would be careful about how deeply you try to parse the grammatical forms.
_Form_ and _function_ are two different things. It's important to keep them
straight (particularly when using non-native terminology to talk about the
grammar).

In English, you can say adverbs end in _ly_. Does that mean that **bully** is
an adverb or that **silly** is an adverb? But, **fully** is indeed an adverb.

Analyzing 会わなく as an adverb is not going to help you understand the Japanese
any better. 会わない is in form an i-adjective, as such it inflects much like an
i-adjective does.

If I want to say, _My apple is red_ , you would say.

> りんごがあかい

If you wanted to say _My apple is turning red_ , you would say,

> りんごがあかくなる

This does not say, _My apple is becoming redly_.

会わない is how you say "they don't meet". If you want to say, "they've stopped
meeting", then one way to say this is to use なる. But the grammar of なる
requires a particular form precede it.

If it's a noun, then になる

> カエルになる

> He turned into a frog.

If it's an i-adjective, you replace い with く

> あたたかくなる

> It'll get warm.

No one understands these as "He becomes froggily" or "It'll get warmly".

Yes, in form these could be construed as adverbs, but they don't actually
function that way in the sentence; it's just part of the form into which the
word must _inflect_ to function properly in the sentence.

I can say

> 去年ほんを毎日読んだが、さいきんほんを読まなくなっている

> Last year I read books everyday but recently I've stopped reading books.

The last half of this sentence is not saying

> I've become in the manner of not reading books

As convoluted as that sounds in English is just how convoluted it would be for
an individual to understand 読まなく as an adverb in Japanese.

## In summary

An adverb describes the manner in which something happens. But in these
example above, we're not describing _the manner_ in which something happened
but rather that state into which things transitioned.

Likewise, Riko and Mai transitioned to a state where they were no longer
meeting each other. They did not become not-meetingly.

# ADDENDUM: Thinking from a native Japanese grammatical perspective

The construction that you have is as follows

> あう ＋ ない ＋ なる

to link these together, you must sequentially construct the [連用形]{れんようけい} of
each component--this not entirely true, please read on.

The 連用形 of あう is あい

The 連用形 of ない is なく

Except that ない does not attach to the 連用形; it requires the [未然形]{みぜんけい}.
Which, in the case of あう is あわ

Now you can take

> あう ＋ ない ＋ なる

and modify the forms so that they can be glued together

> あわ＋なく＋なる

and thus you get

> あわなくなる

Perhaps the key here to help you understand what's going on is to remember (or
discover if you didn't already know) that Japanese is largely an agglutinative
language. That means (pardon me if you already understand this much) that
words and grammatical structures are essentially built up by stacking them on
top of each other. But before you can stack them, they must be _tweaked_ into
the proper form to match the requirements of the parts that are being _glued_
together.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-08-23T17:41:36.983
89019
2021-08-23T18:23:51.630
2021-08-23T18:23:51.630
4875
4875
89018
answer