An introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar & Language

58 CHAPTER 2. VERB GRAMMAR

ject because the verb does not ’impart’ its action on it. For instance, in ”I

throw the ball”, the throwing action is imparted on the ball. However, in ”I

know the textbook’s material”, knowing is not an action imparted ’on’ the

material - in these cases, rather than , is used in Japanese, so that for in-

stance ”I understand Japanese” is not expressed as

but as

. This is particularly obvious when using verbs in passive
mode, changing for instance ”I eat the cake” to ”the cake is being eaten by
me”. In the corresponding Japanese sentences, the particle changes from
to : becomes. In addition to this,
may mark a verb’s actor, so that it is possible to have two different uses
of in the same sentence:
, translates to ”I ( , actor)
understand ( , verb) this ( , pertaining object)”.
In addition to these three particles, you will also often see (pro-
nounced as ) being used in example sentences. This particle acts as a
disambiguator when a sentence would otherwise be confusing in terms of

who or what it was about, or what it was in relation to. For instance,
and
translate to ”I do not walk” and ”I won’t be walk-
ing today” by virtue of the second sentence disambiguating the context
from as broad as possible (ie, ’in general’), to ’just today’ ( ). This can
have some perhaps unexpected side effects, too: when saying
, ”I do not swim”, the explicit presence of means that you ap-
parently felt that you needed to disambiguate the statement, which means
any listener will suddenly wonder who then ’does swim’, as opposed to
you. On the other hand, merely means ”I do not swim”,

using to mark yourself as verb actor for

.

Verbal grammar - present tense

Before we look at how to form thepresent tense, a note. There is no dis-

tinction between present tense such as ”I walk” and indicative future tense

such as ”I will walk”. Both roles are performed by the same verb form in

Japanese: the

. Any verb or verbal adjective in is automati-
cally in present/indicativefuture tense, so that we see the following: