Please help me create Japanese _sentence_ diagrams for beginners

Japanese Language Grammar
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Was this one, actually:
https://yousei.arc-academy.net/manbow/index.php/term/detail/1031

And no, honestly, it’s pretty technical and was a bit of a headache to translate nicely, so it’s OK, I’m not surprised that it’s tedious. Also, I picked a fairly literal translation over a natural one, so there are quite a few expressions in there I frankly wouldn’t use in explaining those concepts myself. All that probably made it less readable than it should be.

In any case, I hope it’s somewhat helpful here.

For「子供がいる」, I’d say that it’s either the ‘new information’ or ‘phenomenological’ (i.e. describing an observation) use of が. If someone needed to make that statement (and directed it at me in public), I’d probably assume it meant ‘there are children (that I have not noticed)’ or ‘there are children (and the speaker is just pointing out that fact)’. It could also mean ‘children (and not something else or some other people) exist/are here’ (the ‘exclusive’ usage), but I’m not sure when that would apply…maybe in a ‘Hey, get a room, you two! There are children here!’ kinda situation?

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Grr. Just accidentally deleted a draft proposal. I’m going to compose it externally to prevent doing that again.

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yes. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’d agree, but not being native japanese speakers or experts in japanese linguistics, I can’t say we have much of an alternative…as for using wikipedia, it’s generally fairly good on these topics and the same information is available from other sources (just not as succinctly). as it stands, I can’t really say much more than “this is how it’s defined” and “this is what the people who study it say”.

but yeah, I was just providing them as reference.

I believe this is a non-standard usage of “topic” in this context, and I think it somewhat obscures the structure that’s there :person_shrugging:

yes, at least according to typical analysis of japanese grammar

yeah…I have no idea how to analyse this one. I assume it’s related to this…my hunch though is that it’s simpler and more consistent to just treat it the same way as 詳しく

then again, I’m in the い-adjectives are just poorly named verbs faction anyway

can’t you just undelete it?

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In case you can’t undelete it for any reason, here’s a copy.

Copied from deleted post

I’d like to gently remind everyone that the goal of this thread is to come up with a jargon-free sentence diagramming system for beginners and for common, simple sentences.

The goal is to have enough to visually express basic sentences and aid discussion on grammatical points, not to cover every possible corner-case or subtle difference in usage. This is an example of “lies we tell children” to educate (glossing over all the details). It’s okay to speak in absolutes when there are well-known exceptions if they are true for the most common cases a beginner is likely to come across early on.

Here’s a proposal for at least the beginning of a system (still very much a work in progress!). It’s more than likely that as we add more and more examples and additional rules/symbols we may need to revisit the earlier bits.

A system for diagramming basic Japanese sentence

The goal of this system is to visually represent the grammatical components within a Japanese sentence and show how they relate to one another.

Creating a diagram of an arbitrary sentence can help one understand it better.

Creating two different diagrams can aid discussions, perhaps about different ways to express something or different ways to interpret something that is ambiguous.

No system is perfect, and there are almost some situations that this diagramming technique can’t cover, but the authors believe it suffices for the most common cases.

How to create a Japanese sentence diagram

  1. Draw a horizontal line with a vertical line in the middle crossing it (extending above and below the line).

    At the heart of every sentence is a SUBJECT and a PREDICATE. Either one might be implied and not actually present in the sentence. Implied words should be put between square brackets to show they aren’t actually present. Note that one usage of the particle が is to identify the subject of a sentence.

    Examples:

    1. 食べます[私] [が] 食べます
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ども

The fat fingering was publishing accidentally, then intentionally deleting because it wasn’t ready.

Will take me quite some time to compose the rest.

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You are likely quite familiar, but I highly recommend Jay Rubin’s excellent book to anyone here, “Making Sense of Japanese”, the “Wa and Ga” chapter in particular. Relevant excerpts:

Ga always marks the subject of a verb or adjective, and if that verb is the main verb, that means ga is marking the subject of the sentence. Wa never does this.

Wait a minute. Did I just say that _wa never marks the subject of a sentence? Yes, and I mean it. … _Wa only marks a topic of discussion, “that about which the speaker is talking.” And, as Anthony Alfonso so sensibly remarks, “Since one might talk about any number of things, the topic might be the subject of the final verb or time, or location, etc.”

He then goes on to make the exact point you made earlier (that I agreed with here):

Alfonso’s remark about the possible contents of a topic suggests that a wa topic can be the subject of a sentence, but I am still going to insist that it never is.

He then gives the example of 私は行きました, using his “old standby” as a translation:

“As for me, [I] went.” The “I” is in brackets here because it is present in the Japanese sentence only as an unspoken subject. Watashi is not the subject of the sentence. It is simply the topic of the upcoming discussion. … The subject of the verb ikimashita is not watashi but the silent pronoun that follows it.

He uses the words “unspoken subject”, “zero pronoun”, and “silent pronoun” at various points for what I’ve been calling “implied” subjects (in brackets) in the diagrams.

All of this is to explain how I interpret the three-は example from the manga as well as the examples from the Tofugu article:

難しくない。
[あれ] [が] 難しくない
it’s not-difficult
Subject: あれ (implied), Predicate: 難しくない (an adjective meaning not-difficult)

If you add the は, though, it changes subtly but significantly:

難しくはない

They translate this as “It’s not (exactly) difficult”, but I’d express it this way:

難しくはない
難しくは [あれ] [が] ない
As to difficulty, it is not
Topic: 難し[さ], Subject: あれ (implied), Predicate: ない (a simple verb meaning non-existent)

I’m fairly certain I’ve got it right and this is how it works, but still welcome any further feedback or corrections. (Certainty is a red flag for me! :laughing:)

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here’s a couple of counter examples from the ninjal corpus.

In all three cases the subject is established upfront, before the adverb. I added emphasis on the subject but the third one is interesting in that it’s a question.

それが決して難しくはないんです。
昔ほど、有名人と知り合いになるのが難しくはなくなりました。
だから、次に何が起こるのか詳しくは分からない。

詳しく is a bit of a weird one since it’s also a set phrase meaning “for more details” and that usage dominates the corpuses.

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I’ll try to understand these better and attempt diagrams for them once I’ve had some coffee.

I’m unsure why starting with a subject might even be a concern though? Again, pre-coffee…

Wait, have I somehow implied that topics can’t come after subjects in Japanese? The particles dictate meaning, not the order, so I think order doesn’t usually matter.

Topics are connected by dotted lines in my current thinking. The left to right ordering in the diagrams is also mostly irrelevant, except that subject must be left of predicate in each clause. Convention would be to order multiple modifiers of the same thing in the same l-r order as the original, tho.

Thanks for the fresh meat! Will help clarify my thinking.

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ah sorry, should have specified that those were counter examples to your adjective modifying the subject hypothesis

I do think reading 詳しくは and 難しくは as a topic in these examples is particularly awkward though (in a way that it isn’t in the examples we’ve looked at before)

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Ah. That makes sense. Let me transition off my phone and ponder how I’d diagram these.

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I’ve only worked through the first sentence, but it has clarified my thinking (I might even understand what you’ve been saying):

それが決して難しくはないんです。

In English, I think this means “In no way is that difficult”.

Literally, though, it’s something like “As for difficulty, that, in no way, isn’t”. Or, maybe better, “As for difficulty, that, in no way, is non-existent”. (There’s a double negative going on there that would need to be corrected in English, though: “in every way” vs “in no way”)

The predicate is the copula ないです, the subject is それ. So the core sentence is それがないです. I’ve started showing copulas (A is B) with a slanting line between B and だ or です.

The topic is 難しさ. This example clarified for me that a topic affects the entire sentence or clause, not just the subject.

I’d diagram this one this way:

Screen Shot 2022-08-28 at 8.59.56 AM
Screen Shot 2022-08-28 at 8.59.56 AM1424×322 7.08 KB

I’m now attempting to show the topic modifies the entire sentence/clause by attaching it to the beginning of the horizontal line.

(One thing I’m not 100% comfortable with: is 決して modifying the topic or something else? I think it’s modifying the topic, but might be convinced otherwise.)

Contrast this sentence with this one that doesn’t include the は topic marker:

Screen Shot 2022-08-28 at 9.11.53 AM
Screen Shot 2022-08-28 at 9.11.53 AM1210×494 7.07 KB

The meaning is almost exactly the same, except the distinction of this particular “thing” not being difficult is reduced. 難しく is only affecting the copula and not the subject.

Thoughts? Does this seem to work? I still need to attempt the other sentences, but will be away for a while.

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it’s only a single negative (the ない)

です is just a politeness marker. it can’t be the copula here since the predicate is the い-adjectiveない (the test for this is what if I said it in plain speech? ないだ doesn’t work).

where did you get 難しさ from? it feels like you’ve fixated on this idea and you’re trying to force the sentence into fitting it tbh. the analysis feels a lot more simple and natural if you treat 難しくはない as a whole as the predicate (also see the note on 決して below)

agreed, that the topic affects the entire sentence (not just the clause). that’s one of the primary differences between the topic and the subject (and why I was saying that the dotted lines are redundant).

you’ve dropped the ん (should be an explanatory の)

決して on it’s own is an adverb meaning decidedly/assuredly, so it modifies the predicate here. 決して〜ない is a set phrase meaning never/by no means.

in this case the predicate is 難しくない. the western grammar interpretation is this is the negative form of 難しい, the japanese interpretation is that 難しい gets conjugated to it’s conjunctive form 難しく and then gets the auxiliary verb ない added on.

adverbs can’t affect the copula. what would that even mean? :sweat_smile:

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Working in the yard - not exactly got my thinking hat on atm, but can’t ない be 有りません?

Not fixated just confused. I don’t understand how です is ever anything BUT a copula. I literally think the core of the sentence is “this is not”. Or “non-existent”.

How do you interpret the sentence in English?

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有りません (from 有る) is a different verb. ない (無い) is an い adjective meaning “not”

this is another one of those messy bits of japanese grammar…

it’s basically due to the combination of the following

  1. the sentence final copula is a predicate
  2. a sentence final い adjective is a predicate
  3. です can mark い adjectives
  4. a sentence has one and only one predicate (you can’t say 行くだ or 難しくないだ)

in the sentence above, 難しく（は）ない is a predicate, so です can’t possibly be predicating the sentence. it’s only function here is as a politeness marker. the open question is whether です is ever a copula/predicate…it’s a really weird piece of grammar

I think you got it more or less right, give or take the nuance the は gives. I can’t think of a better translation tbh - I’m not too familiar with what the は does here.

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Are you saying this is wrong?

If so, I’ve got about 40 years of unlearning to do. :sweat_smile:

Also what is the past-tense negative of ある if not ない?

Lastly, I think you are saying it’s 無いです in this sentence?

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to quote your draft, “This is an example of “lies we tell children” to educate (glossing over all the details)” :stuck_out_tongue:

it’s a good enough explanation unless you’re delving into grammar

afaik, it’s a degenerate verb that doesn’t have a plain negative form (at least in common use in standard japanese). you use ない instead.

ありませんでした works for the polite form though.

as an aside, classical japanese had あらず and 関西弁 uses あらへん

yes, but by convention, auxiliaries use hiragana rather than kanji

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CD doesn’t disagree, she too explains in a further video that です can be used as an empty politeness marker after i-adjective, so there is not much difference between 頭が熱いです and それがないです, in both case です has no grammatical function.

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Aha! That cleared it up for me. Thank you.

So ご飯が無いです and ご飯が無い are exactly the same grammatically except the latter has a politeness marker at the end. Makes sense and I can see that it should be notated differently now.

I can buy that, but need to ponder. I still think ですis VERY commonly a copula, though.

Will research further.

Still a little suspicious of thinking of ない as an い-adjective in that latter sentence, though (shorter version). It will be very hard to think of it as anything but an informal ありません. As I said, will research.

All of this is to say it’s not that I disbelieve you folks, it’s that I don’t understand.

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in a sense, it doesn’t really matter if it is an informal ありません.

if you look at how it conjugates, it behaves exactly the same way an い adjective would, .e.g.
赤い: 赤かった・赤くて・赤ければ
難しくない → 難しくなかった・難しくて・難しくなければ
行かない → 行かなかった・行かなくて・行かなければ

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Back at the computer for a bit.

Unless you are trying to create a sentence diagram for it … :grin:

I need to understand the function in order to diagram the sentence so that it can be parsed and understood correctly.

I did indeed drop the ん in my diagram which definitively proves your point that it’s definitely an い-adjective in the sentence それが決して難しくはないんです. I wish I had noticed when you called that out earlier.

I’d love to have someone with more knowledge of Japanese grammar than me attempt to create a jargon-free diagram showing how the constituent parts of that sentence relate to each other.

If not, I’ll keep plugging away with the “Does this work?” “No, that doesn’t work” game for a while.

Making progress. This is helpful:

I need a symbol for “The invisible ‘it’”. I’m thinking maybe “[@]” instead of “[Ø]” because it’s more obvious how to type it on a keyboard.

One step forward, two steps back.

To add to the confusion: です: Japanese Word for Politeness

For what it’s worth, I strongly disagree with this sentence toward the top: “The most fundamental function of です is to mark a sentence as polite.” I feel that it’s most fundamental function is to say that something IS something else.

Both だ and です function identically grammatically, but there is an inward-vs-outward nuance that is important to understand.

This one discusses that nuance in much more detail, but doesn’t discuss grammatical function, either: Da (だ) vs Desu (です)—How People Use them in Real Life

HOORAY! Here’s the explanation I sought

Here is a Cure Dolly queued to where she makes point that @Arzar33 referenced (です following an い-adjective at the end of a sentence is just a decorator it performs no function):

I’m still optimistic that I’ll be able to distill all this into some sort of visual system, but it’s admittedly easy to get lost in the weeds.

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