34 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
referring directly to what we’re talking about, it is far more natural to use
pronouns instead:
”I bought a really good book. I had already read it, having borrowed
it from the library last month, but I saw it in the bookstore on dis-
count, so I decided to buy it.”In this sentence, the pronoun ”it” is used quite a number of times,
replacing ”the book” at every instance:
”I bought a really good book. I had already read the book, having
borrowed the book from the library last month, but I saw the book in
the bookstore on discount, so I decided to buy the book.”This sounds unnatural to English ears, even though grammatically
speaking there is nothing wrong. In Japanese, pronouns are part of a class
of wordscolloquiallyreferred to as ”kosoado”, , for the fact that
they all start with either ”ko-”, ”so-”, ”a-” or ”do-” depending on their level
of proximity (for instance, ’this’ vs. ’that’) and whether they are stative or
interrogative (’that’ vs. ’what’).
1.4.5 Nominalisers
Japanese has an extra class pertaining to nouns, known as the nominalisers:
words that, when used with other words or phrases, turn these words or
phrases into something that can act as if the whole construction is a noun.
In English, an example of this is the collection of words ”the way in which”:
”The way in which the government is handling the issue of criminal
law is questionable.”In this sentence, ”the way in which” is used to turn ”the government
is handling the issue of criminal law” into a single noun construction. As
such we can replace ”the way in which the government is handling the
issue of criminal law” with a simple pronoun if we wish to talk about it in
later sentences:
”The way in which the government is handling the issue of crimi-
nal law is questionable. It does not seem to be motivated by sound
principles, but by back-office politics.”Japanese has quite a number of thesenominalisers, each with its
own meaning and nuance, and we shall look at these nominalisers in the
chapter onnominals, too.