40 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
they know about the speaker. This is what makes Japanese hard: most of
the time, in every day Japanese, subjects and objects will be omiĴed left and
right because, as a competent listener, you should know what they should
have been – Japanese relies heavily on people’s ability to guess what some-
one else is talking about, something which can only come through regular
exposure to, and use of, the language.
1.5.1 Word order
While it’s all well and good to know that minimal Japanese is an (S)(O)V
language, it’s also important to know that in Japanese, grammar is put di-
rectly into the sentence through the use of particles. While in English gram-
mar only becomes apparent through the positioning of words, in Japanese
words are ”tagged”, as it were, with their grammatical role. To illustrate
this, an example sentence:
kinou wa inu ga watashi no gohan o tabemashita.This sentence is composed of several ”blocks”: , ’kinou wa’,
indicates the noun ’kinou’ (”yesterday”) as context, in , ’inu ga’, the
noun ’inu’ (”dog”) is marked as verb actor, in , ’watashi no’, the noun
’watashi’ (”I”/”me”) is madegenitive(forming ”my”) and linked to ,
’gohan o’, the noun ’gohan’ (”dinner”) marked as direct verb object, with
the final word ’tabemashita’ being the past tense of the verb ”eat”:
”Yesterday, (a/my/our) dog ate my dinner.”In English, there is very liĴle position variation possible in this sen-
tence: ”A dog ate my dinner, yesterday” is still okay, but rearranging the
sentence to read ”Yesterday, my dinner ate a dog” completely changes the
meaning of the sentence from something unfortunate to something unset-
tling. In Japanese, the explicit presence of grammar markers in a sentence
means that rearranging the ”blocks” doesn’t change the meaning of the