100 CHAPTER 3. MORE GRAMMAR
I ate breakfast and went to school serial action
I bought juice and tomatos noun list
It’s my car, and don’t you forget it emphaticTypically, when you encounter ”and” in an English sentence, the
Japanese sentence (unless you’re translating to formal Japanese) will not
have it mapped to a construction.
In addition to this conjoining of sentences, the conjunctive
also works for certain word combinations.
Verb/verb conjunctive
The most common conjunction is the verb/verb conjunction. This takes two
verbs, and forms a compound verb with them, by placing the first verb in
and combining it with the second verb in its normal form. There
are plenty of examples to choose from for this type of conjunction:
first verb second verb compound verb, ”fly”
, ”take out” , ”come flying out”
, ”walk”
, ”go round”, ”turn” , ”walk in circles”When verbs are conjoined this way, it is quite common for the okuri-
gana (the hiragana that indicates inflection on verbs and verbal adjectives)
of the first verb to be removed: may be wriĴen as , but is
still pronounced , and may be wriĴen as but is
still pronounced.
A lot of the time, compound verbs created this way have a meaning
which is readily guessable. However, sometimes the compound verb is
one that’s been in use for ages and its meaning has changed over time.
This is a good reminder that while the grammar explains forms, it doesn’t
necessarily explain semantics (ie, the actual intended meaning). Be careful
when creating your own compound verbs - it’s not unlikely you’ll come
up with a combination that already means something else in some subtle,
or even not so subtle way.
There are a few special verbs which when used in this fashion add
a specific meaning to the compound. These are:
- ’Fix’, ’correct’, ’repair’ Used as second verb in a verb/verb com-
pound, this verb creates a ”to re-[...]” verb, such as: