156 CHAPTER 4. PARTICLESmark’ role is fairly easily demonstrated:”(I/you/he/she/it/we/they)’ll go.””Will/shall (I/you/he/she/it/we/they) go?”The more interesting functions of are found when it is used in
subphrases instead, such as in the following example:”(I) thought (about) whether I should do (it).”Let’s take this sentence apart and look at why it does what the trans-
lation says it does. First, this sentence consists of two parts: and
[...]. The first is the dubitative form of , with the questioning
particle , so that ”let’s do” becomes ”will/shall (I/you/he/she/it/we/they)
do?”. This is then combined with the past tense for [...] , ”think [...]”
or ”think about [...]” to form ”think about [will shall ... do?]”. This isn’t nat-
ural English, so we need to rewrite it using appropriate words: a dubitative
question in English uses the word ”whether”, so going from Japanese to
literal English to natural English, we arrive at ”think about whether (or
not) to do (something)”. And since this is a past tense we arrive at the
translation that was initially given.
The more complete version of ”whether (to) [...]” would be the pat-
tern ”whether or not (to) [...]”, and Japanese has an equivalent to this: [...]
:
”(I) have no idea whether he’ll come over or not.”We can even form more elaborate yes-or-no, be-or-not, do-or-not,
etc. questions, by using two separate questions. This might be a bit con-
fusing at first, as in English we always put our choices in a single sentence,
but in Japanese a double question paĴern is in fact quite common:”Will (you) have coffee, or tea?”While the English translation shows that this is just a normal ”or”
question, the Japanese sentence joins up the otherwise separate questions