160 CHAPTER 4. PARTICLES
- Subject, actor, weak emphasis, contrast
We already saw in chapter 2, in the section on verb particles, where it
was explained that it could mark verb actors and subjects. In addition to
this, can be used for weak emphasis, usually translating to the English
weakly emphatic ”but”, such as in the question ”Excuse me, but do you
know the time?”, where its role is mostly to ”ease in” the main statement.
Similarly, eases in the main statement, although rather than geĴing a
comma in front of it like ’but’ does, it gets a comma after:
”Excuse me (but), what time is it?”
Again like the English ’but’, can be used as a proper contrastive:
”That is true, but (the) problem consists of more than just that (is-
sue).”
This sentence consists of the sections , ’that is (also)
true’ and , ’the problem is not just that
(issue)’, joined with for a contrast. These sentences use the particles
and , since it’s hard to illustrate a proper contrastive without using a
moderately complex sentence, but for the purpose of this example we don’t
really need to look into their precise meaning. We will, however, look at
in more detail later in this section, and we’ll examine in the next
particle section.
On a final note, in classical Japanese, fulfilled the same role as
does today. As such, you may encounter ’set’ phrases that use in a
genitive meaning.
This particle is a nicely complex one. The grand unifying role that it plays
is, actually, unification, but the way in which it does it is usually experi-
enced as doing completely different things. We already saw being used
to create an exhaustive noun list in chapter 2 in the section on noun parti-
cles, but this role extends not just to things, but to people as well. In the
same way that [X] [Y] [Z] is an exhaustive noun list (ie, the unity of all
