4.2. PARTICLES 167something.- Instrumental, event location
The role of is technically two-fold, although some people consider the
form of , which is also wriĴen , a particle, in which case there
would be three roles.
The first role is that ofinstrumentalis. In English, this is things like
”by”, ”with” or ”using” in relation to some instrument, in sentences like
”This was wriĴen with a red pen” or ”We came to the US by airplane”. In
Japanese, the role these words play is done with :
”(It)’s wriĴen with a red pen.””(We) came to America by airplane.”A second important role that plays is that it signifies the loca-
tion of a verb action, or event. For instance, in English the sentences ”We
played in the park” and ”The knives are in the cupboard” use the same
preposition ”in”. In Japanese, these are two very difference things: the
first sentence focuses on an event, while the second focuses on a location.
Consequentially, the first sentence requires , while the second sentence
uses another particle,.”(We) played in the park.”This use of is quite nice when one says something that in En-
glish would be ambiguous such as ”We stayed at a hotel.” In English, it
is not possible to tell whether this would be an answer to ”where did you
stay?” or ”what did you do?”, without more information available to us.
In Japanese, this distinction is immediately obvious:”(We) [stayed at a hotel].””(We) stayed at [a hotel].”As mentioned, can also be said to have a third role, namely as the
continuative form of the copula , which is , although this is some-