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In my bilingual dictionary, ばかり is listed as a particle. Yet in a tutorial on ばかり, I came across the following sentence:

車を買ったばかり。

I just bought a car.

What's weird to me is that the sentence ends in a particle (ばかり). How is this grammatical?

  • Is this just a slangy way of saying this sentence?
  • Perhaps ばかり doubles as a noun, and there is an implicit だ (copula) being dropped at the end?
  • ...something else?
George
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  • related: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/56681/is-desu-needed-at-the-end-of-every-single-sentence-also-can-you-add-end-partic – Shurim Mar 01 '23 at 01:00

1 Answers1

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ばかり can work also like a no-adjective (which is a noun), just as はず, ため and so on can. So yes, this is a sentence with an implicit だ/です. The canonical version of this sentence is (私は)車を買ったばかりです or (私は)車を買ったばかりだ.

Since ばかり can work as a no-adjective, you can say this, too:

  • 車を買ったばかりの男
    a man who just bought a car
naruto
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