Use of Much with Adjectives

Hello Roro

I feel it is a bit too difficult to discuss the grammar of our language comparatively with those of Indo-European ones. For example, "I like apples very much" is usually translated into "Boku wa ringo ga totemo suki desu". But strictly speaking "Boku wa ringo ga totemo suki desu" is "As for me, apples are very likable". The exact translation of "I like apples very much", I think, should be "Boku wa ringo-o ooini suku". So I think English "very much" or "greatly" would correspond to our "ooini" and the simple "very" to "totemo".

I don't know much about the concept of negative/positive polarities, though I know some words are used only in negative contexts and some only in positive ones. However, I feel which word for which polarity would change with time. For example, "totemo" in Japanese is now commonly used for intensifying positive adjectives. But it was originally used exclusively for negation. (Ex) "Sono koi wa totemo kanawa-nu yume datta" (That love was a very never-come-true dream). I was taught in school "zenzen" (at all) should be used only for negation, but now young Japanese use it in positive contexts. So I think the so-called polarity concept is a concept not very clearly recognized by speakers, whatever language they speak.

I think how to intensify a verb or an adjective is basically based on speaker's judgment. So it would not be easy to explain the usage of intensifiers very logically. For us Japanese, it sounds a bit odd to use the same intensifier both for verbs and adjectives. But for the people who are accustomed to such collocations, it would not be unnatural. This is a really difficult matter.

Hi Roro again

Neither have I said "Boku wa ringo-o ooini suku" in my life. I usually say "Boku wa ringo ga totemo suki desu". As far as I understand, "suki desu" is a polite form of "suki de aru" where "suki" is the 'ad-verbal' form of a na-adjective "suki-na", which in turn comes from the verb "suku". It is true the use of the verb "suku" is getting obsolete in our language but still we can find many writings that use the verb "suku". For example, Oogai Mori wrote "otto o hidoku suku tsuma" ("a wife who abnormally loves her husband").

I too hadn't thought much about the grammar of the Japanese language before I joined in an online forum where Japanese language learning people from foreign countries and English learning Japanese people exchanged their language knowledge. Talking with foreign people, I noticed I didn't know about the grammar of our language much enough to explain to the Japanese learners why I say what I am saying. This experience inspired my desire to learn more about Japanese and English, though such language knowledge doesn't do with my real life (I am merely a college professor of an engineering field).

As you know well, English and Japanese are really foreign each other in their structures. But still we could come across many similarities in the trivial collocations of the two languages. "At all" ("zenzen"/"mattaku") will be a good example. "I don't think the two are different at all" can be quite naturally put into Japanese "Buku wa sono futatsu ga mattaku chigau to-wa omowa nai." Don't you agree? As for the affirmative use of English "at all", OED says that indeed "at all" was once used affirmatively. It says: "This affirmative use, although it has disappeared from speech at the formal level, lives on in Irish dialect and in colloquial speech in certain parts of America, especially after a superlative, as in the sentence 'We had the best time at all'".

Speaking about the semantic difference between verbal and adjectival intensifiers, I feel "greatly" (English "very much" and Japanese "ooini") better fits to verbs, and "truly" or "unusually" (English "very" and Japanese "totemo") fits better to adjectives. To me, "She is truly/unusually pretty" sounds natural but not "She is greatly pretty". How about to you?

Hello Roro

It's true my profession has nothing to do with languages. My specialty is how to design biological wastewater treatment plants, in which field I might be allowed to say that I was once one of the five top engineers in Japan. Why I am so interested in language learning? I myself don't know it. If there is any reason, it would be that I didn't learn English enough in my high school days in which time I was mad only at learning mathematics and physics, and that, accordingly, I have suffered from some kind of inferiority complex about my language skills through my life.

I have a CD-ROM version of OED. I think it is equivalent to 20 volume books if it is in hard copies. It contains definitions of 500,000 words and 25,00,000 quotes. What I like about it is that it describes in great details about the historical usage change for each word.

As to the matter of "She isn't greatly pretty", I am afraid you might misunderstand me. If you read my previous post you could know that I have an opinion against the use of quantitative intensifiers for adjectives. So I assure you I will never say such things as "Kanojo wa ooini kawaii" or "Kanojo wa ooini kawaiku nai". I believe qualitative intensifiers such as "truly"/"hontoni", "unusually"/"hijou-ni", or "highly"/"totemo" can modify adjectives more naturally than "greatly"/"ooini".

The Japanese learners' site is 和英交流. Please visit there if you like. I myself have been long absent there. I think it takes a great patience for a native speaker to continue teaching their language to non-native learners for a long time. In this regard, I greatly respect moderators here.