Whether verbs are a closed class in Japanese is largely a matter of perspective, I think. I’m pretty sure something like “janpusuru”(ジャンプする) is considered a single word. Am I wrong?
The claim that I’ve read and heard from linguists about this is that while words like janpusuru are semantically verbs, grammatically they are a noun janpu + the standard verb suru.
Contrast the English expression “I am doing homework” vs. “I am *homeworking”. “Homework” isn’t really used as a verb in English, but we can express the idea of homework-as-an-action by saying “do homework”.
New non-suru verbs in Japanese do apparently happen from time to time (Wikipedia uses the example of guguru — “to google”) but they’re rare, so the class is mostly closed.
Whether verbs are a closed class in Japanese is largely a matter of perspective, I think. I’m pretty sure something like “janpusuru”(ジャンプする) is considered a single word. Am I wrong?
The claim that I’ve read and heard from linguists about this is that while words like janpusuru are semantically verbs, grammatically they are a noun janpu + the standard verb suru.
Contrast the English expression “I am doing homework” vs. “I am *homeworking”. “Homework” isn’t really used as a verb in English, but we can express the idea of homework-as-an-action by saying “do homework”.
New non-suru verbs in Japanese do apparently happen from time to time (Wikipedia uses the example of guguru — “to google”) but they’re rare, so the class is mostly closed.
That makes good sense.