4.2. PARTICLES 175
Ever.
That said, you can use in a question to disambiguate just fine:
”Who’s recently been coming (over)?”
literally: ”Lately, rather than during some other time frame, who has
come (over)?”
This particle plays two important roles in Japanese. The first is that it acts
as a similarity marker, and in this use it replaces the subject or disambi-
guity marker :
A:
B:
A: ”I like books.”
B: ”I also like books.”
Like or , it can also be used to form lists:
A:
B:
A: ”Do (you) like books, or do (you) like music?”
B: ”(I) like both books and music.”
However, marks a similarity to something previously mentioned,
so you cannot use the particle out of the blue. It requires a prompt either
by someone else, or by something you yourself just said. Interestingly, this
can even be something in the same sentence:
”Young and old, welcome.”
Here the fact that is twice (and it can be used more times) means
that the similarity is between all the marked parts of phrase.
Because normally is reserved for responding to some kind of
prompt, it’s usually a good idea to consider the Japanese counterpart
to the English ”too”, in the sense of ”also”, without considering it a valid
