174 CHAPTER 4. PARTICLES
Of course, sometimes it will feel like isn’t doing this strict disam-
biguation, such as in simple sentences like the following:
”Nice weather today, isn’t it?””Actually, I’m horrible at Japanese.”In both sentence, the looks perfectly innocent, but it’s actually
still doing the exact same thing. In the first sentence, the fact that
has to be mentioned means that the situation of good weather is implicitly
being contrasted to some previous, poor weather. Similarly, in the second
sentence it seems like , ’truthfully’ or ’actually’, is fairly innocent, but the
fact that it has been explicitly mentioned and marked with means that
the information that follows only applies in the context of ’true informa-
tion’. Even when sounds like it’s just siĴing in a sentence as a common
courtesy, it never loses its additional connotation.
So in summary, we can characterise as doing the following:
X [Y] = in the context of [X], [Y] applies, and outside the context of
[X], [Y] does not apply.Put concisely, tells us the applicable context, as well as the inap-
plicable context, at the same time.
Because of this, you will typically find referred to as the ’context’
particle (or ’topic’ particle) in literature, but this is dangerous terminology,
as it makes it really easy to forget that it also indicates the inverse at the
same time. never just marks applicable context, it always – always – also
gives the inapplicable context simply by virtue of being used. If you don’t
want to also imply inapplicable context, use – or – instead.
(Almost) needless to say, this also means you never use for things
you’re asking questions about. For instance, in the following example sen-
tences the first sentence is fine, and the second is very, very wrong:
”Who came (over)?””Who, as opposed to someone else, came (over)?”This second sentence makes absolutely no sense at all, and you should
never ever mark subjects of questions with.