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The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

8020japanese.com

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Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#141

Post by kazinator »

glandium wrote: post #139
kazinator wrote: post #94

Hey all, on a topic related to this: here is another way to get some feeling for the different sentence structure. I recently finished making English subs for a 45 minute Japanese rock concert video from the 1980's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No Here I introduce a concept in subtitling whereby a subtitle template with dashed ("------") blanks appears for an entire English sentence, and the blanks conver…

"This video contains content from UMG, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." :(

Somewhat ironically, this problem hinges on an excerpt of a studio album song which plays over the ending credits for less than a minute. Not around the actual video album itself. That's what the content ID system latched on to.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#142

Post by blipmusic »

gizmo686 wrote: post #129
blipmusic wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Is this where people start flaunting their phd:s, professor titles? j/k ;-) academic here as well - I do not hold a phd) Well, I realise the topic + contrast bit but is it really treated as a null anaphora, rather than acting as both topic and subject marker in my example...? My examples referred to information structure more than anything. Yes, I realise you can have sentences like "Ashita wa Tanaka ga..."/"Sou wa…

No PHD here either, just undergrad followed by some hobbiest reading (of scholarly sources) on Japanese linguistics. To be clear, the comment about null anaphora was more of a throwaway comment anticipating the objection that sometimes the topicalizing wa does mark the subject. While I have seen this explanation presented, and it is my prefered explanation, I would not necessarily call it pervasive. Now, for the expl…

Thank you so much for this writeup - it does ring a bell!

Don't worry about references. This is more than enough to get me re-started, dig through my old books/articles and find new ones.

> Further, even under this alternative explanation, I would still not call wa a topic marker.

-> "subject marker"? ;-)

Enjoy your vacation (and maybe pursue a phd)!

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#143

Post by glandium »

gizmo686 wrote: post #107
migueloller wrote: post #103

The article says: > What this means is that the sentences, “This is a car”, and, “This is the car”, would both be, 「これは車です」. There is no differentiation. This is not always true. The latter could be 「これが車です」. The は and が particles are very similar but are still different. Fully grasping this small difference is one of the biggest problems Japanese learners encounter when studying grammar. Closer to the beginning, the…

This isn't quite true. は has two distinct usages. One is to mark the topic of the sentence. The other is to mark the subject of the sentence with a contrastive connotation.

It also has a use for emphasis. And a few others uses.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#144

Post by glandium »

strongai wrote: post #127
gizmo686 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't quite true. は has two distinct usages. One is to mark the topic of the sentence. The other is to mark the subject of the sentence with a contrastive connotation.

And what does 'contrastive connotation' mean?

See the examples on http://www.jgram.org/pages/viewOne.php?tagE=ha-2

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#145

Post by monster_group »

tom_mellior wrote: post #95
monster_group wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you brought up Sanskrit and topic of discussion is sentence structure I will provide one more data point. Because Sanskrit is a highly inflected language there is a lot of flexibility in sentence structure in Sanskrit. In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. This flexibility comes at a very high price though - there are tens of ways in which a noun can transform and theore…

> In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. But will all of those variants still be considered the "same" sentence? I'm asking because it's popular to make the same claim about Hungarian, but it's not really true. You can switch things around a lot and still get fully grammatical sentences that all relate to the same event. But due to Hungarian's topic/focus structure, the actual…

Yes, in most cases the sentence will still mean the same unless it's a very complicated sentence with multiple nouns and adjectives where there may be some ambiguity as to which adjective goes with which noun (and that too only if declensions happen to be in the same case). Having said that, the most common sentence structure used is still subject-object-verb.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#146

Post by monster_group »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #105
tom_mellior wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. But will all of those variants still be considered the "same" sentence? I'm asking because it's popular to make the same claim about Hungarian, but it's not really true. You can switch things around a lot and still get fully grammatical sentences that all relate to the same event. But due to Hungarian's topic/focus structure, the actual…

Yeah, and reading Latin is complicated by the fact that Latin authors like to put the adjective and its noun on oppposite ends of a phrase and then stuff other things in between. So, instead of "the yellow car in my driveway that belongs to my brother" they'll say "the yellow in my driveway that belongs to my brother car". Because an adjective must match its noun in number, gender and case, the authors think of the n…

Pretty much everything you said about Latin holds for Sanskrit too. Sanskrit has additional complication 'Sandhi' - euphonic combination [1]. There are many rules which are used to combine words depending on the ending sound of the first word and the beginning sound of the second. And you can keep on combining words as long as the rules are applicable. So you can get very long words without a break. Newbies often struggle with this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#148

Post by vram22 »

lisper wrote: post #147
vram22 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so ? How

Subject, object, etc -- all of the "arguments" -- come before the verb.

Hey, it was a joke - though maybe not a good one, Forth-syntax-wise. Just something I quickly came up with. I actually know Forth a bit. Had played around with it some earlier.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#149

Post by lisper »

vram22 wrote: post #148
lisper wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subject, object, etc -- all of the "arguments" -- come before the verb.

Hey, it was a joke - though maybe not a good one, Forth-syntax-wise. Just something I quickly came up with. I actually know Forth a bit. Had played around with it some earlier.

Oh, I see. Sorry. Dense very I was being. :-)
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