副詞 example sentence - two を / clauses question

Here is the example sentence for 副詞:

私は昨日、日本語の時を表す副詞を学びました。
I learned Japanese adverbs that show time yesterday.

I believe you can only have up to one を per clause, so I wanted to double check the breakdown of this sentence, specifically the part after the comma.

  1. 時を表す = show (signify) time
  2. 時を表す副詞 = adverbs that show (signify) time
  3. 日本語の時を表す副詞 = Japanese adverbs that show (signify) time
  4. 日本語の時を表す副詞を学びました = I learned Japanese adverbs that show (signify) time

Anyway, that’s my analysis of the sentence meaning/translation. Is that correct?
Also, I’m trying to understand clauses better. I’m honestly not sure which pieces from 1-4 above are clauses vs noun phrases vs something else. Any explanation on that would be appreciated.

I think your breakdown is fine. I’d translate 表す as “express” but there’s no difference there.

That breakdown looks correct.

A “clause” is basically a complete sentence within a sentence. To identify a clause, it helps to think of the sentence as a tree. To think of the sentence as a tree, it helps to break it down into units, or “constituents”. For instance, each of the 4 segments you look at is a constituent. Base on this, we can draw that part of the sentence in tree form:

                     VP     
         ____________|_____________
         |                        |
        NP                        |
  _______|_________               |
  |               |               |
  |              NP               |
  |          _____|____           |
  N          S         N          V
  |          /\        |          |
日本語の    時を表す    副詞を    学びました

Don’t worry about where to put the particles (there are highly technical reasons why they go with the nouns).

While the constituent analysys gives you the shape of the tree, it does not tell you what each node of the tree is. To do this, I start at the bottom and work up.

Hopefully, you can identify what part of speech each individual individual word is. The first problem is identifing what 「時を表す」 is. Notice that this end with a verb, and is followed by a noun at the next layer up. In Japanese, the only place a verb can go is at the end of a clause, so we know 「時を表す」 must be a clause.

Next, lets look at what 「時を表す副詞を」is. Since, 「副詞」is a noun, and the entire phrase just modifies 「副詞」, we can conclude that the entire phrase is a noun. Similarly, in 「日本語の時を表す副詞」We are just modifying the noun phrase 「時を表す副詞を」with 「日本語の」, so we again have a noun.

The next problem is what to call the entire phrase. In general, the reason this is a verb phrase is fairly technical, and probably not useful to know (as in, there are linguists who would disagree with this assessment). In this case, we can see it because in the entire sentence, it is being modified by the adverb 「昨日」. We can also guess this because Japanese is very “right-headed”, meaning that the classification of a constituent is based on the right-most element in it. For example, all of our noun-phrases had either a noun or a noun-phrase as their right child. Similarly, the entire phrase has a verb as its right child, and is a verb phrase. This doesn’t always work. For instance, a noun-phrase+verb-phrase could be either a verb-phrase or a sentence. In fact, you might notice that 「日本語の時を表す副詞を学びました」would be a complete sentence, except for the fact that it is preceded by 「私は昨日」.

I hope this makes sense. I tend to spend more time explain Japanese to my linguistics classmates than I do to my Japanese classmates, so might have gone a bit overboard on the technicalities.

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That explanation was very helpful. Once you pointed out which part was a clause versus a noun phrase, it all clicked. I’ve learned this all before but I just wasn’t getting it in this example.

And don’t worry about your explanation being overly technical. As a computer scientist who has learned about tree parsing, the tree diagram and your explanation of it works very well for me. Also, thanks in particular for mentioning the part about Japanese being “right-headed”. In retrospect, that’s the obvious generalization of sentences ending in verbs and the existence noun phrases. And hopefully that will help me keep this straight next time around.

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