Sentence Connection in the Japanese Language -from the Viewpoint of English Grammer-

Abstract

When we translate a Japanese sentence into English, we sometimes cut it into two separate sentences without using any conjunctions. In this paper we tried to clarify the characteristics of sentence connection in the Japanese language by contrasting them with those in the English language. Though there are no relatives in Japanese, the pronouns 'ko' and 'so' especially play very important parts in sentence linking, and there are many conjunctions derived from pronouns. A particle 'wa' often unites all the sentences in a paragraph. A subject introduced by 'wa' often functions as that of the following sentence or sentences of a paragraph. In English there is a strong tendency to avoid repeating the same full words in a sentence or even in a paragraph, while in Japanese the same words are often used again and again in a sentence. Moreover it seems that the same words, when used many times, often join all the sentences in a paragraph. Finally we treated the ambiguous logical meaning of a connective particle 'ga.' Its use is so delicate that in some cases we can not decide whether it is copulative or adversative.