4.2. PARTICLES 161these things), if we use people instead of Xs and Ys, we end up with a uni-
fied group:”Honda and Sakaki are going to go see a movie.”In this sentence, the ”noun list” exhaustively lists
all the members of the group of people that will go see a movie.
An interesting feature is that can unify a group of people, or a
group of things in general, leaving the central, contextually obvious noun
implied. For instance, examine the following sentence:In this sentence, means ”(I/he/she/it/we/they)
went to Tokyo”, and looks like an incomplete noun list. How-
ever, this is one of those aspects of Japanese where context is important:
we can leave off a contextually obvious ”thing” in a noun list, and expect
people who understand Japanese to fill this in themselves: in this case, the
most obvious interpretation is that ’I’ or ’we’ went to Tokyo with Kimura.
However, just because it is the most obvious, that does not mean it’s the
only interpretation possible. If, say, we’re discussing what a mutual friend
of us has been doing over the holiday, without that friend present, and one
of us would uĴer the phrase then the con-
textually omiĴed person would be our mutual friend, rather than either of
us.
There are several ways to make the omiĴed ’thing’ explicit. One of
these is to use the dismabiguation particle, :”Ishida (rather than someone else) went to Tokyo with Kimura.”However, this only makes sense if the sentence would otherwise be
ambiguous. If instead we only want to reiterate the person’s identity, we
would use :”Ishida went to Tokyo with Kimura.”In this sentence, has been explicitly mentioned as primary verb
actor, and because he’s already been mentioned, can be left implied in the
listing that follows.