2.3. NOUN INFLECTION 71
2.3 Noun inflection
Nouns do not inflect in Japanese. More interestingly, they don’t even de-
cline like they do in English; turning ”book” into ”books” for instance, or
”us” into ”our”, are declensions that indicate something in addition to the
root noun, likepluralityor possessive. Instead, everything’s either done
by marking nouns (or indeed entire noun phrases) with particles, or by
using copula verbs.
2.3.1 Particles
There are three important particles that we can use when dealing with
noun inflection/declination, being , , and.
The particle is generally explained as being used to genitively
link nouns, but that doesn’t tell us what it really does. In Japanese, geni-
tive is expressed as either marking possession (origin or root concept), de-
scription, or a contextualising construction. In English, examples of these
would be ’my car’ in ”this is my car”, ’love song’ in ”this is a love song”,
and ’old story’ in ”that’s just an old story”, but while in English these are
seemingly different constructions, in Japanese they all use :
”This is my car.”In this sentence, which illustrates being used for possession, the
function is fairly obvious: ”[X] [Y] ”means ”[X]’s [Y]” or ”[Y] of [X]”. This
is the ”simplest” use of. However, things get more complicated when
we look at the other three functions.
”This is a love long.”In this sentence, the idea behind the paĴern is slightly more compli-
cated, because it’s related to a paĴern of thought that we’re generally not
used to in English. In the sentence, the ”song”, , is considered a specific
kind of song, which we can explain by saying ”it genitively stems from
”, meaning that as a whole, the word derives its core meaning from ,
but its nuance, or context, from. This is a complicated way to look at
what’s going on in a seemingly simple particle, so it is usually easier to
note the specific interpretation instead: we can say that describes , or