ABSTRACT
A traditional presentation of the verbal system consists of ichi-dan/go-dan (or yo-dan) verbs, and some foreign grammarians even call them weak/strong verbs, in an excessively Western way. It will be proved that ichi-dan does not in fact exist. But rather than give the verb category the adequate zero-dan (or mu-dan) nomenclature, why not simply reach a consensus by naming the two categories: regular verbs/semi-regular verbs…?
Going a morphological step further, i.e. after the Ø/a-i-u-e-o basis (dan) conjugation, there has not been, up till now, any consensus in admitting suffixes, auxiliaries and/or longer idiomatic forms in the diverse grammatical categories.
The agglutinant characteristic of the Japanese verbal system provides a model for the notion of ‘extension,’ allowing the interrelation between ‘notional extension’ and ‘morphological extension.’ In fact, hundreds of such extensions exist. Such a double feature analysis may even be … extended to other languages.
Such categorizations lead not only to general rules concerning verb extensions but to the general scheme of language as well. This theoretical correspondence has to be kept in mind until some new metalinguistics, i.e. some more accurate science, allows language categories to be analysed without the help of (approximate) metalinguistic words.
