Japanese Case marking

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Tengado
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Japanese Case marking

Post by Tengado »

To what extent is it true that Japanese case marking works like this:
1) Make an SOV sentence with all the normal cases marked (subject, object etc etc)
2) Move one of the NP's to the front and change its case marking for the topic marker は
3) Guess the role of the topic from context - verb valency, other expressed NPs, semantics

And if it doesn't work like this, what are the differences?
- "But this can be stopped."
- "No, I came all this way to show you this because nothing can be done. Because I like the way your pupils dilate in the presence of total planetary Armageddon.
Yes, it can be stopped."

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Post by faiuwle »

Well, there are some case postpositions (ni comes to mind, and there are probably others) that can be followed by the topic marker and don't get replaced by it.
It's (broadly) [faɪ.ˈjuw.lɛ]
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Post by Terra »

Well, there are some case postpositions (ni comes to mind, and there are probably others) that can be followed by the topic marker and don't get replaced by it.
I think only "o" and "ga" can be replaced by "wa". All the others stack.

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Post by con quesa »

That's the gist of it, but of course gists gloss over complexities. For instance, it's common to drop the core case markers (i.e. subject が, object を, and I think even in cases where those would be topicalized to は you can drop it), especially in colloquial speech, but by no means universal.

It's true that only the distinction between が and を is neutralized when they are topicalized, other postpositions/case markers stack は onto it: に->には, で -> では (side note, I remember reading somewhere a paper that argued that only が, を, に and some uses of で are true case markers in Japanese, with other things following nouns being true postpositions, but I don't remember the details. Something about whether or not quantifier float was permitted or not). Which means if you have a sentence like 私はハンバーガーを食べている, watashi wa hanbaagaa wo tabeteiru, "I am eating a hamburger", it's easy to tell that "watashi" would be marked with ga if it weren't topicalized. And of course the transitivity of the verb does play an important role, there are lots of verb pairs which differ in sort-of systematic ways based on whether they are transitive or not.

And of course, there are subtle pragmatic distinctions which I don't fully understand that you can make by marking an argument with は or not. "彼がハンバーガーを食べた", [/i]kare ga hanbaagaa wo tabeta[/i] is different from "彼はハンバーガーを食べた", kare wa hanbaagaa wo tabeta. I'm always turning in assignments where the teachers cross out a が and write は or vice versa :(

And I don't think that a は-marked argument must necessarily be the first constituent of a sentence, although if you can it's probably a rare usage. It makes sense for the topic to be the first constituent anyway.
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Post by Zhen Lin »

It was possible (and remains possible dialectally) to stack wa on wo, yielding -wo-ba. (Yes, rendaku.)
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Re: Japanese Case marking

Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

Tengado wrote:To what extent is it true that Japanese case marking works like this:
1) Make an SOV sentence with all the normal cases marked (subject, object etc etc)
2) Move one of the NP's to the front and change its case marking for the topic marker は
3) Guess the role of the topic from context - verb valency, other expressed NPs, semantics

And if it doesn't work like this, what are the differences?
One simple sentence destroys the whole process :

象は鼻が長い。
Zou ha hana ga nagai.
Elephant noses (trumps) are long.

Here, the "ha" element has no grammatical case involved other than topicality. "As for elephants, their noses are long."

What's best is to link "ha" with "mo". "mo" is "also", you use it when you add the topic to a group. Contrast with "ha", where you set the topic apart from other things to say something specific about it.

You'll use case+"ha" only with directional cases, but to some extent, directional cases add some semantic information (the direction) so it not that surprising (QcFr does the same thing, after all, when there are arguments with directionality).

And you usually guess the case of "ha" through context indeed, compare :

俺はパンを食べる。= As for me, I'll eat bread.
Compare with "mo" : 俺もパンを食べる。= I'll also eat bread.
パンは俺が食べる。 = As for bread, I'll eat it.
Compare with "mo" : パンも俺が食べる。= I'll eat bread as well.
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Post by phoenix »

Zhen Lin wrote:It was possible (and remains possible dialectally) to stack wa on wo, yielding -wo-ba. (Yes, rendaku.)
Sweet!

I once wrote a paper on Rendaku hoping to find some way to not make it seem batshit crazy irregular.

It kinda did the opposite. Although I now know why we have hitobito but not **tabidabi.
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Post by Kereb »

phoenix wrote: It kinda did the opposite. Although I now know why we have hitobito but not **tabidabi.
Isn't it something like ... you never get rendaku after a syllable with a voiced stop?
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Post by Tengado »

Berek wrote:
phoenix wrote: It kinda did the opposite. Although I now know why we have hitobito but not **tabidabi.
Isn't it something like ... you never get rendaku after a syllable with a voiced stop?
I think it is if the syllable already has a voiced stop - there can be only one
- "But this can be stopped."
- "No, I came all this way to show you this because nothing can be done. Because I like the way your pupils dilate in the presence of total planetary Armageddon.
Yes, it can be stopped."

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Post by phoenix »

'Rendaku can't occur if the second element of a compound already has a voiced element (that has a voiceless counterpart, m,n and r don't block rendaku'.

The restraints are a bit more restrictive, like the previous syllable sometimes has influence too. tabi-hito is the form, not tabi-bito, which is probably due to the preceding *bi.

It's always difficult to truly determine the reason for the absence of rendaku, since it's irregular. Yes it has restraints, but there's no 'reason' why it sometimes shows up and sometimes doesn't. There are simply words who don't play along for no reason.

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Post by Zhen Lin »

phoenix wrote:The restraints are a bit more restrictive, like the previous syllable sometimes has influence too. tabi-hito is the form, not tabi-bito, which is probably due to the preceding *bi.
But it is tabibito. *tabihito appears to be unattested.
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Post by phoenix »

Hah you're right. I found tabiHito as a personal name in my dictionary though.

Man, I can't think of the example right now, but there are some indications that when the preceding syllable is voiced rendaku is also often blocked.

Names are notorious for having rendaku variants.

yamada, yamata
honda, honta
etc. etc.
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Post by Zhen Lin »

I've never heard of Yamata or Honta. I've seen -sawa/-zawa, -saki/-zaki, -kawa/-gawa, -shima/-jima, -hara/-bara/-wara variants, however.
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