1.5. SENTENCE STRUCTURE 41
sentence at all:
kinou wa watashi no gohan o inu ga tabemashita.
”Yesterday: my dinner, (a/my/our) dog ate.”watashi no gohan o, kinou wa, inu ga tabemashita.
”My dinner – yesterday – (a/my/our) dog ate.”kinou wa inu ga tabemashita, watashi no gohan o.
”Yesterday (a/my/our) dog ate; my dinner.”tabemashita, inu ga, watashi no gohan o, kinou wa.
”Ate, a dog (did), my dinner, yesterday.”All of these are perfectly valid sentences in Japanese, because all
the words with meaning are explicitly tagged with which role they play in
the sentence. While some of these sentences will sound more usual than
others, they all mean the same thing. However, once we start moving the
particles around, pairing them with words from different blocks, the same
problem arises as we saw for English:
( )( )
kinou wa inu ga watashi no gohan o tabemashita
”Yesterday, (a/my/our) dog ate my dinner.”( )( )
kinou wa gohan ga watashi no inu o tabemashita
”Yesterday, (the) dinner ate my dog.”In summary, it is not so much word order that inherently gives
meaning to a sentence in Japanese, but the ’semantic blocks’ of words,
paired with specific particles. Their combination tells you what the block
means, and what role it plays in a sentence. As long as the pairings are
preserved, you can order these blocks in any way you like and maintain
the same sentence meaning. Which blocks go where, finally, depends en-
tirely on what you believe is the most important bit of the sentence, as is
highlighted in the next section.