222 CHAPTER 4. PARTICLES
- Between
Literally, this noun stands for the concept of ”in an interval”, where this
interval can be either temporal or spatial:
literally: ”In the interval (bank - post office)”
”There are public phones located between the bank and the post of-
fice.”As can be seen from the example, the list of locations between which
some verb action occurs, or some verb state is the case, is created using the
standard inclusive noun listing particle.
For time, on the other hand, the [X] [X] paĴern is used, be-
cause this lets us specify an interval with an explicit beginning and end:
”The culprit (managed to) escape between the hours of 2 and 3.”- Near
This is actually the noun form of the verbal adjective
, ’near’, and is
used for locations only. This noun is (fairly intuitively) used to indicate
something is close to some location or object:
”It’s close to the movie theatre.”- Facing, across, opposite, beyond
In Japanese the idea of ”across”, ”opposite from” and ”beyond” are all
variations on the same theme of something facing something else: some-
thing opposite to us clearly faces us, something that is for instance across
the street faces us from across the street and something that lies beyond