An introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar & Language

72 CHAPTER 2. VERB GRAMMAR

that acts as context for , and that this construction is closely related to

the idea of a compound noun.

In this interpretation, ”[X] [Y]” typically translates to ”[X] [Y]” in

English, so that becomes ”love song”, and for instance

becomes ”old story” (with being a noun meaning ’long ago’, and

meaning ’story’). If we use this in a slightly bigger, more interesting sen-

tence, we see the following:

”(That)’s just an old story.”

This sentence is particularly interesting because it uses twice.
[X] means ”just X”, with meaning ’just’ or ’merely’, and [X] being
any noun phrase, in this case ” ”. This kind of chaining can be taken
to extremes, such as in the following example:

”My sister’s friend, Sasaki, came over (today).”

Let us analyse what happens in this chain. It usually makes most

sense to analyse long chains like these by looking at the [X] [Y] paĴerns

in a last-to-first order, because (as always) the most important words come

last:

[X] [Y] translation

(my/your/his/her/our/their) friend, Sasaki

(my/your/his/her/our/their) sister’s friend

(my/our) sister

While this sounds like an artificial example, it is actually quite com-

mon to find three or even four nouns linked through to create a single,

more and more specific noun phrase. The main issue with learning to use

these paĴerns, and more importantly, understanding them while listen-

ing to native speakers, is that the most important information comes last,

so you have to keep track of all the context nouns before the finaloperative

noun gets used.

The other two particles and are much simpler to understand

than : links nouns to form an exhaustive list, while forms a repre-

sentative list. For instance, if someone went to the supermarket and bought