Hello everyone, I was wondering if the community can help me out on a sentence. I’m a beginner to Japanese and I’m currently learning about noun modification. In the sentence below, is it considered a noun modification? If not, what sentence structure is it known as?
"それから歩いて神社に行きます。”
I understand the て form present, but still unsure.
Thank you.
I’m not sure what you would call the sentence structure, but it doesn’t have any noun modification. Here the て form is working to join two sentences together and express a relationship between them:
それから歩く + 神社に行きます
(In this case the relationship is that the first sentence is giving the means/method for the second.)
So the part before the て is at the “same level” as the whole second half of the sentence; it’s not “underneath” 神社.
No, in this sentence there is no noun modification (?). What do you mean you understand the て-form? Given your question I doubt it.
て is used to connect two parts of a sentence together. What exactly that means depends a little on the concrete sentence. In the one you gave, you can think of it showing the way/method in which you do the following action: go to the shrine “by walking”
車を運転して神社に行きます → go to the shrine “by driving a car”
If a verb modifies a noun in Japanese it has to be in plain-form.
hi, it’s not noun modification.
The て-form here is just connecting two actions in sequence, first you walk, then you go to the shrine.
The meaning is ‘after that, I go to the shrine by walking, noun modification would be when a verb describes a noun, like ‘the shrine that I go to by walking.
To add on top of what others have said, the て form is adverbial: it modifies verbs, not nouns. If you have a て form you have some other verb afterwards doing the actual work in the sentence (although in some cases it can be omitted).
Arguably an exception to this is the imperative use of the て form (助けて！) although you can still say that there’s an implied verb here that’s being elided.
Other verb forms such as the plain/dictionary forms and past た form can be used to modify nouns however (as well as other forms that conjugate like plain verbs such as the potential form 歩ける or causative 歩かせる).
歩ける人: a person that can walk
歩かせられていた人: a person who was being made to walk (past-progressive-passive-causative). Note that a て form is sneaking in there, but the actual grammatical verb modifying 人 is いた.
I think the sentence might be:
歩いてそれから神社に行きます
That word ordering sounds very odd to me, because it forces it to mean “I walked, and then I went to the shrine”, and 歩く just isn’t an interesting or significant enough action to want to give it as the first part in an “I’ll do this, and then I’ll do this” sequence. (You could say “I’ll walk from one end of Yoyogi Park to the other and back, and then I’ll go to the temple”, but “I’ll walk, and then…” is weird, same as in English.)
それから歩いて神社に行きます on the other hand is totally natural for “And then I’ll walk to the shrine.”
Haha. Sorry, I just reached minna no nihongo unit 16 today which includes exactly similar sentences. 
Don’t take my reply seriously for grammar points. 
Mmm, 散歩して、それから would work OK, because “go for a walk” is an activity that fits into a list of things you’re doing where “walk” isn’t so much.
Is that a thing? I always thought it’s just a shortcut of 助けてくれ where the imperative form is clearly on the くれる while the 助ける connects to it in plain old て form.
(But there are ofc cases where the imperative ends in て 
).
It’s usually got its own definition listed as a light imperative with the same meaning as てください or てくれ.
③ 依頼、軽い命令を表す。…てください。…てくれ。「早く来て」「私にも見せてね」
I guess it goes back into the whole “is something being omitted or not” discussion that frequently occurs in Japanese.
