I don’t have nearly as strong of a grammar background as others in this thread, haha (and find the sentence diagrams really confusing, personally), but I think the point is that 今日はかわいい actually has ambiguity. The speaker could be saying “you look cute today!” and meaning it as an unambiguous compliment, or they could be saying “you look cute today (but not the rest of the time).”
The は adds emphasis to 今日, but the exact nature of that emphasis is unclear. Whereas with も, it changes the meaning to “you look cute today (as well as the rest of the time),” so it’s more unambiguously a compliment.
In the senryu (猫に手を貸したいくらい今はひま), to me the は comes across as specifically stating that now, in contrast to the rest of the time, the speaker is bored enough to want to help out even a cat. The present moment in time is being singled out as different.
If you move 今は to the beginning, 今は猫に手を貸したいくらいひま, the sentence reads to me more like: “right now, I’m bored enough to want to help out even a cat”. In this case, it can be either stating neutrally what state the speaker is experiencing in that moment (marking the topic), or it could be contrasting that state against the rest of time (contrastive は).
I think in English, we often sort of drop “right now” or “today” from sentences that in Japanese would start by marking the topic with 今は or 今日は, or at least that has been my experience translating Japanese speech into English. It can come across as redundant in English. Like you could remove the first two words and not lose the meaning in English if 今は is the topic marker, because the “nowness” is implicit in the speaker saying their current state of being: “(right now) I’m bored enough that I want to help out even a cat”.
However, if 今は is contrastive, we can’t drop it from the English translation because it’s specifying “right now” in contrast to the rest of the time, which adds additional meaning.
Even in English, swapping the order of “now” changes the meaning in a similar way, in my view. Compare:
猫に手を貸したいくらい今はひま
“I’m bored enough now to want to help out even a cat”
今は猫に手を貸したいくらいひま
“right now, I’m bored enough to want to help out even a cat”
Swapping out the は with other particles, here’s how these read to me:
猫に手を貸したいくらい今もひま
“I’m bored enough (right now as well as another time) to want to help out even a cat”
猫に手を貸したいくらい今のひま
“The boredom of this current moment is so great that I want to help out even a cat”
The の example doesn’t have that same contrastive implication that は has. It’s just neutrally describing the present moment without saying whether or not the present moment is distinctive in any way.
Maybe what’s confusing is that it does shift the overall grammar of the sentence because 今 becomes functionally an adjective and not a noun anymore? I guess maybe that’s where sentence diagrams could come in, if I was able to understand them .
We are currently debating whether 今 is a topic in both, or just one of those Japanese sentences.
My understanding is it’s a topic in both. @theghostofdenzo and you (?) appear to be arguing that it’s only a topic in the second. If that’s the case, what is 今 in the first sentence? It’s possible my understanding of “topic” differs from yours.
There might be a subtle shift in nuance between the two Japanese sentences (I’m not convinced), but without a counter-example diagram I stand by my desire to diagram them the same way.
The current debate is focused on three questions:
Does は after a 名詞 (or nominalized phrase) always indicate that thing is the topic? Or does it sometimes indicate something different. That is, can it be a "contrasting は” when it follows a noun?
How should we diagram honest-to-goodness topics? I think we’ve converged on dotted lines connecting connecting to entire clauses, but if someone wants to argue that it’s better to keep the sentence order let’s discuss WITH EXAMPLES.
How should we diagram a “contrasting は”. The example before was 難しく・は・ない. In that case we agreed that connecting the は to the “dictionary dot” between the root of the verb and the modifying suffixes made sense.
If this is another case of a contrasting は, how should it be diagrammed since it has a noun on both sides?
Here are the two diagrams I've proposed for the first sentence above
I prefer the first (because in other examples with explicit subjects and verbs it makes more sense for a topic to modify the entire clause).
If someone wants to create a diagram for the は not being a topic indicator, I’d love to see it.
NOTE
It appears that every example diagram I’ve created with a topic so far has generated fierce debate. I find this curious.
I’m starting to suspect that people either think は only rarely indicates a topic, or they think it’s only a topic if both は-connected and が-connected nouns are explicitly present (in that order).
Even 私はうなぎです, a classic example of は NOT introducing a subject caused consternation. Thinking about は as a topic marker with a zero-pronoun subject in this sentence actually makes things easier to understand once it clicks. This is why I’m so adamant about diagramming it as I did.
I’m shocked that nobody else seems to agree. This isn’t a new idea.
I don’t think 今 is ever “functionally an adjective” (something that modifies nouns) without の.
My dictionaries all say 今 is a noun (名詞) or possibly an adverb (副詞) in sentences like 「今行きます」or 「今着いたばかりです」.
I’d debate “in a similar way”. English and Japanese are pretty different in many ways.
Order is important in English, a language without topic markers (or even as clear a distinction between topic and subject). I’m not convinced the order is as important in Japanese (which uses topic markers and other explicit particles indicating function).
The most vigorous debate seems to come from people that don’t like them and presumably don’t plan to use them. I find this curious, too.
I’m not forcing anyone to use these diagrams. I’ve no interest in convincing people that don’t like sentence diagrams to use them.
Suggestions on how to make them clearer, though, are more than welcome. As are suggestions for how to capture other aspects of the language. But with examples, please!
Others and I have already found them useful. I remain convinced that it’s worthwhile to continue expanding the “visual vocabulary” to capture other aspects of the language. Help is appreciated.
Addendum
It finally occurred to me that replacing the は with が instead of の might more clearly illustrate my point.
I think this perfectly illustrates why I want to diagram it this way. With が, 今 indisputably becomes the subject. With は, however, the subject is the zero pronoun, and 今 is the topic.
(Hmm… This makes me wonder if the 貸したいくらい modifier should attach to the subject instead, though, in both cases. I don’t think the end is a relative clause. It might be an independent clause or entirely separate sentence with が.)
I can’t give a diagram because they do my brain in, but I do think the sentence would need to be diagrammed differently for both, whatever choices you’re making with it. Word order does have an effect on meaning, because it leads to different things being emphasized. Latin is even more free about word order than Japanese, and even there word order affects what’s emphasized.
Well, there are loads of sources if you google “contrastive は”, so presumably it does in fact exist as a distinct phenomenon . Here are some examples that maybe explain it better than our explanations in this thread?
From my understanding, the main difference between these two Japanese sentences is that the second introduces ambiguity that is not present in the first by moving 今は to the beginning:
猫に手を貸したいくらい今はひま
“I’m bored enough right now to want to help out even a cat”
今は猫に手を貸したいくらいひま
“right now, I’m bored enough to want to help out even a cat”
Do those two English sentences read as exactly the same to you in nuance? To me, they don’t. The first sentence (in both Japanese and in English) slightly emphasizes that the state of boredom is occurring right now, in contrast to the speaker’s normal state. The second sentence could be emphasizing that same thing, or it could just be neutrally describing that the state is happening at this present moment. There is ambiguity!
I don’t think people are assuming this (at least, I’m certainly not). I think “topic” is just a difficult concept to pin down and we have a bit of a hard time conceptualizing it because English is so different.
I think maybe why I struggle with the sentence diagrams (in addition to just straight up having difficulty parsing them) is that sentences in Japanese often have a lot of ambiguity that is lost when they’re forced into a box like this. I’m glad that they can be helpful for some people, but I’d be careful not to be too rigid about what particular elements are doing or meaning. It might be that there simply is no one-size-fits-all solution for は!
My point was that adding the の turns it into an adjective when it isn’t typically one . (Maybe a good time for the contrastive は, if I was writing in Japanese )
Sorry, I will leave this thread. I only joined in on this discussion because I participated in the original senryu translation discussion, and I was following up after that conversation and got roped in because the grammar debate was interesting to me…
contrastive is not about the breadth of things the statement applies to, it’s about whether the marked clause is being contrasted with something else.
some examples:
non contrastive は:
A: あっ、うなぎだ！
B: うなぎはおいしい！
implication: eels are tasty
contrastive は:
A: 晩ごはん美味しかったですか？
B: うなぎは美味しかったです。
implication: the eel was nice but everything else was awful
も:
A: うなぎ美味しかったですか？
B: うなぎも美味しかった。
implication: everything, including the eel was nice.
が:
A: 晩ごはん美味しかったですか？
B: うなぎが美味しかったです。
implication: the eel was especially good (nothing is implied about the rest of the food but the eel is singled out).
it doesn’t explicitly state it, no. but if you said it to someone without otherwise indicating a different subject, that’s how they’ll interpret it. you could say “you” is the default subject in this case.
the subject cannot be a zero pronoun. the zero pronoun is a stand in for the subject since the subject isn’t mentioned. the sentence still has to be making a statement about something even if we don’t mention it.
I think the most fundamental disagreement we’re having is whether sentence order matters. choosing a particular sentence order is usually intentional and the change it imparts in not at all subtle to me!
I don’t think I can provide examples that you’ll accept since this comes down to how you interpret what’s happening in japanese. I’ll say “look the nuance is clearly very different in these cases” and you’ll say “there might be a subtle difference but I don’t think it’s important since it’s semantically saying the same thing” (we’ve already been through that).
I’m not claiming I’m right, but you asked for opinions and I gave one. since this isn’t looking like a particularly productive discussion at this point, I suggest we move on.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure we can (though see my proposal at the end).
Topics vs. subjects and the zero pronoun are just too common to ignore. We must make a decision here in order to be able to move on.
Heated debate
Ah. That makes sense. The senryu thread is all about semantic interpretation! (I forgot I’d linked from there.)
I apologize to both of you for letting my frustration show!
The goal
I’m attempting in this thread to create a visual system to show the tokenization and parsing of Japanese sentences. I hope to show the syntax/structure, connections (what affects what), and the functional type of various components.
Yet we keep getting drawn into protracted debates about semantic meaning and nuance.
That comes later!
Diagrams can be useful for those discussions, but sentence diagrams themselves merely represent how sentences are parsed, not their semantic meaning.
For old school computer nerds, it’s the difference between how lex and yacc would interpret a bunch of text versus what actions a compiler or interpreter would do after parsing.
Illustrating word order and nuance with an ENGLISH example
Take this English sentence
In the morning, the dog brought me his old ball.
Using English sentence diagramming rules (which can’t be used 1:1 on Japanese sentences) we would diagram it as
Note that word order changes utterly between the original sentence and the diagram.
The diagram only shows the syntactic structure: what words affect what other words, and which words are part of the “core” clause “dog brought ball” (in English SVO order). It doesn’t in itself explain any nuances regarding what the sentence means.
The sentence would be diagrammed identically even if “in the morning” was moved to the end of the sentence.
As written, it stresses “morning”. If the sentence was “The dog brought me his old ball in the morning”, then “dog” is subtly stressed more than “morning”. Either way, though, the sentence diagram is identical (because “in the morning” only affects the verb “brought”).
Subjects and the zero pronoun
Semantically, I understand and agree with that point. Syntactically, it’s a problem. We can show “[@]” in a diagram as the stand-in, but how else could we represent the unknown thing being stood in for?
Let’s go back to this simpler sentence:
私はうなぎだ
Semantically, the logical subject is potentially either “I” (unlikely) or “my order” (more likely).
But what about diagramming? We cannot put the word 私 or 私の注文 where the subject goes because those assume a specific subject that isn’t provided.
私 cannot be the syntactic subject because it’s marked with は (which never indicates a subject).
だ is clearly a copula, the verb in the predicate, not the subject.
うなぎ isn’t the subject because だ is unambiguously a copula. It couples two things. Eel is the object (the B in an “A is B” sentence).
NOTHING explicitly written in the sentence is the subject.
Yet every clause must have a subject and a predicate! I believe this is as true in Japanese as it is in every other language, which is why sentence diagrams start by separating the simplest possible subjects and predicates on a horizontal line.
[Edit: I really need to get in the habit of calling them 主語 and 述語, however.]
Something has to visually represent the subject. I’ve been using “[@]” as a visual representation for the concept of a zero pronoun. Yes, it’s a stand-in, but for the purposes of diagramming it goes where the subject goes!
I’ve tried to diagram the core idea explained in that article (and throughout the CD videos) as directly and unambiguously as possible.
QUESTION: IS THERE ANY DISAGREEMENT ABOUT THE DIAGRAM ABOVE?
I am.
Claiming, that is. I’m old enough to know how often I’m wrong, though.
Proposal
I’m proposing that at least for now we agree that syntactically, は following a 名詞 (or 形容動詞 or “noun phrase”) ALWAYS indicates a topic. Where “topic” is context that applies to everything that follows and should be diagrammed as such (a dotted line connecting to the solid horizontal of an entire clause).
If we agree to that, I think we can move forward.
Otherwise, please propose a counter-proposal for how to handle は-identified nouns (with a visual/diagramming representation), or I think we’re doomed to keep having similar discussion ad infinitum every time a new example sentence emerges.
EDIT:
If forgot to reply to this part:
Thank you for the examples. I understand your point of, for example, うなぎは美味しかったです meaning the eel was delicious (while excluding the other parts of the meal, and thus implying they might not have been so delicious).
That’s again a semantic interpretation, though. Syntactically, うなぎ is still a topic in that sentence.
In this case, the logical, semantic subject is also うなぎ, but syntactically I feel quite strongly that it’s still the zero pronoun standing in for うなぎ that must go in the “subject” part of the horizontal line, not うなぎ itself.
In other words, I feel that whether or not the は is contrastive semantically, I feel that the zero pronoun is still syntactically the subject and うなぎ is the topic of this sentence.
Weird case in point: Imagine the setup was “Three sea river (!) creatures walked into a bar and ordered beer. Two got two-year-old, sour, stale beer, and one got a nice, cold, fresh pint.”
うなぎは美味しかったです
Same exact sentence in a different context, with a different semantic interpretation, and with a different subject (now [@] is simply standing in for “the beer” without excluding anything).
It seems to me that your "contrastive は” has to be a semantic concept, not a syntactic one, and depends on additional context. How else can we parse this sentence without the zero pronoun in place as the subject?
Are you suggesting that the diagram should change based on the surrounding context?
finally got around to making tree diagrams of these
Summary
these are a type of tree diagram called dependecy trees. there’s another kind called constituency trees [1], but I find these more intuitive.
NOTE: these are not “proper” diagrams, but my simplified interpretation. they should be enough to be useful and to give an idea of how they work.
the basic idea is simple. nodes of the tree depend on the ones above them, so the more important something is, the higher up the tree it is.
the basic test of whether something is a dependency is that if you delete its dependents, they stop making sense.
the bottom row is special in that it’s just the words from the sentence. the things they connect to are the word class.
N: noun
V: verb
P: particle
A: adjective
Adv: adverb
0: zero pronoun
Sentence 1:
not much to say here. the verb (V) is the most important thing in the sentence, and if we delete it nothing makes sense.
Sentence 2:
I don’t really know what to do with the topic, so I’ve thrown it in a box to the side . I think traditionally it would be treated as another node off P, but to me, that doesn’t really capture what it does or the extent it affects the sentence.
the only other difference with this one is that we have an extra level attached to 鉛筆. both かれの and 赤い depend on it, and there’s no particular reason to favour one and you can delete either without any problems.
also I’m treating です as the copula for the sake of convenience.
sentence 3:
this one’s pretty interesting. は depends on ない because you couldn’t include it if ない wasn’t there.
んです attaches to 難しい because it doesn’t really do anything.
if that’s your goal fair enough. as far as the word order in your diagram is concerned, if you’re not bothered about it then that’s fine. I think it makes it harder to interpret and so I don’t like it, but it’s your choice.
you were mixing semantics and syntax here:
in the absence of further context, the sentence 今日はかわいい means today you are cute. the subject is implicitly “you” by default. you might say it meaning something else, but that’s how the vast majority of people will interpret it.
syntactically, it has no subject, zero pronoun or otherwise. the zero pronoun is just the absence of the syntactic subject. it doesn’t affect the meaning of the sentence (semantics). it is however, useful for reminding learners that there’s an unmentioned semantic subject.
it’s kinda frustrating that we’re repeating this zero pronoun discussion given my response was to you asking what the semantic meaning of the sentence was tbh…
if you’re defining the topic as such, then ok.
agreed. that was specifically meant to illustrate what we mean by “contrastive” vs “inclusive” and “exclusive”. it’s perfectly fine for は to be both.
But we are diagramming individual sentences in isolation.
I think the diagram must work in any context, not just the special case of “no additional context”. If someone came across that sentence in a poem about a dog and asked us to diagram it, it would make no sense if the diagram said the subject was “you”. (And I don’t think the diagram should change for different contexts.)
Fair point. Apologies, but I’m not sure you understood why I’m so focused on syntax (see above).
Just ten types of words in a nice logical hierarchy. This may help us (or me at least) make some decisions on which things should be indicated differently in a diagram.
The ten parts of Japanese speech:
動詞 — verb
形容詞 — adjective (い-adjective)
形容動詞 — な-adjective (nominalizing adjective)
名詞 — noun
副詞 — adverb
連体詞 — pre-noun or adnominal adjective (attributive)
I’m pretty sure I understand what all ten classifications mean, but I’m a bit unsure about 副詞 vs. 連体詞. I don’t think it’s terribly important, but if anyone can explain the difference to me, I’d appreciate it.
My translations (corrections welcome)
Keeping this here for fellow yomichan addicts.
品詞の分類 (Parts of speech classification)
単語 (word)
自立語 (independent, freestanding words)
活用のあるもの (words that can be conjugated/inflected) 用言 (declinable/inflectable word)
(単独で述語となるもの) (single, solo words that can become a predicate)
動作・存在を表す (indicates action or existence) — 終止形の語尾がウだん (plain/dictionary form ending in う)
Looking up some of the terms, within that subbranch (words that don’t inflect and can’t become a subject), the 副詞 are the words that modify 用言, and the 連体詞 are the words that modify 体言. 体言 are basically nouns, pronouns, numbers and counters. 用言 are verbs and adjectives (including na-adjectives) – the word that’s doing the main work in a sentence, if you like. So (as you indicate on the chart) the 副詞 are all the adverbs, and the 連体詞 are the oddball set of words that modify nouns but aren’t adjectives (things like この・その・あの and あらゆる).
This is unrelated to diagramming, but for completeness:
It occured to me that the diagram above doesn’t differentiate between 自動詞 (intransitive verbs) and 他動詞 (transitive verbs).
I’m pretty sure that only affects the topmost line in the diagram (but would love to be corrected if I’m wrong).
Other useful vocabulary relating to Japanese grammar that isn’t in the diagram above (useful meta-vocabulary for talking about sentence diagrams):
自動詞 (intransitive verbs, “self-affecting”) e.g. 上がる
他動詞 (transitive verbs, “other-affecting”) e.g. 上げる
文章 (sentence) e.g. 「これは赤い鉛筆です」
述語 (predicate, “the action or state”)
e.g. 「〜赤い鉛筆です」、「〜そこにある」、「〜電話する」
可能動詞 (potential verb) e.g. 「読める」、「書ける」、「言える」
状態動詞 (stative [state/condition] verb, hint: cannot make a gesture for)
e.g. ある、いる、だ、赤い
使役形 (causative form, affecting something else) e.g. 〜せる、〜させる
受身形 (”passive” or better maybe (?), “receptive” form, being affected by something else)
e.g. 〜れる、〜られる
代名詞 (pronoun) e.g. これ、それ
人称代名詞 (personal pronoun) e.g. 私、あなた、彼
Any others that are particularly useful to know?
Please correct any mistakes (I’m uncertain of anything marked with a question mark).
[By the way, I realize I’m WELL off the path of “jargon free”. I’m still adamant about keeping the diagrams themselves jargon free, though. I just want to be able to use Japanese grammatical terms to talk about parts of a diagram and to explain the rules for creating diagrams.]
状態動詞 is a subset of verbs, not an inflection of a verb. More specifically, it’s verbs that represent a state, rather than an action. Wikipedia’s examples are「ある」「いる」「足りる」「違う」「似る」「痛む」「ヒリヒリする」「見える」「思う」, and for English: be, have、like、know、wear、believe.
Idle side note, but I wonder if 人称代名詞 is a direct translation of the western-tradition grammar term, rather than one deriving from traditional Japanese grammar analysis. Personal pronouns aren’t really the same in Japanese…
.
)
. I think traditionally it would be treated as another node off P, but to me, that doesn’t really capture what it does or the extent it affects the sentence.
