I'm trying to give my knowledge on particles a boost. I've been putting it off for ages because I knew it would open a whole new can of grammatical worms. But there's no way around it I guess.

Okay, so first I was trying to learn the differences between WA and GA. I read this in A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar:




It was D that struck me specifically, so I looked up the explanation for subordinate clause:




And all was well. (note it says it must have a subordinate conjugation, kara, keredo etc.) So then I went back to the GA expl. to see some more sub-clause/GA examples:




And none of them have subordinate conjugations! Can anyone explain this please?

Anyway, I then tried to take the GA-or-WA tests in A Dictionary of Japanese Particles and came across this:




The answer is GA. But I'm wondering why it is. I don't see how it complies with the GA summary (at the top of this post).

Unless... now I'm thinking this sentence might come under the GA/sub-clause rule.

When is a subordinate clause a subordinate clause? I've come to realise even if you take a subordinate clause out of a sentence, that sentence will still make sense (it'll just be less detailed). So, with this in mind, know I'm wondering could a sub-clause be as simple an adjective? In this case TAKUSAN, thus putting this sentence under the sub/cl-GA rule?

Bit confused.

A noun modifying clause is also subordinate clause.

Your final example is not related to subordinate clauses (nothing in that sentence can stand on its own as a sentence). This GA usage falls under rule "a".

たくさん is 副詞／形容動詞 (adverb or na adjective depending on usage), both of which are modifying words and thus cannot stand on their own (aka be a clause).

As Jarvik said. A subordinate clause is any clause (predicate and anything attached to the predicate) subordinate to the main clause. So in the first example up there, (デビがフランスへ行く). It's inserted into the main clause, which is 私はことを知らなかった, modifying こと.
Or maybe you're supposed to separate the こと out with it to clarify it's subordinate. I'm not really a fan of the particulars.

QuackingShoe Wrote:As Jarvik said. A subordinate clause is any clause (predicate and anything attached to the predicate) subordinate to the main clause. So in the first example up there, (デビがフランスへ行く). It's inserted into the main clause, which is 私はことを知らなかった, modifying こと.
Or maybe you're supposed to separate the こと out with it to clarify it's subordinate. I'm not really a fan of the particulars.

Yeah, the main clause does not include the koto wo. That is there to nominalize the subordinate clause before it's inserted into the main clause, since there is no noun in the main clause to modify and 行く can't modify another verb.

A good first-approximation to the subordinate-clause question is to ask "which verb[*] does this something-GA attach to?". ([*] actually, predicate, so might be an adjective.) If that verb is the main verb of the sentence then your thing-GA isn't in a subordinate clause; otherwise it is. In your example 子供達がたくさん来ましたよ the 子供達が attaches to 来ました so it's not a subordinate-clause GA.

This way of looking at things has the advantage that you don't have try to identify subordinate conjunctions. No doubt somebody will be along shortly to point out some case it gets wrong, though ;-)

Maybe this will clear up some of it...considering a simple case and then an analogous case with a clause.

I know it.
I know that Debbie went to France

I ate lunch yesterday
I ate lunch when Bob was free

This is a book. I bought it in America.
This is a book I bought in America.

In English, key words to look for are "that" and "when", among others

Interesting.

I was not aware that subordinate clause rules applied to clauses ending in forms like no de, -eba, etc. I always thought that they applied only to modifying clauses.

The other thing to note is that in modifying clauses, a topic is introduced by の, not は.

As for question 8. the answer is が because of rule 7A. Children are a new bit of information you are introducing.

Raichu Wrote:The other thing to note is that in modifying clauses, a topic is introduced by の, not は.

I don't think it's possible to introduce a topic in a modifying clause at all -- do you have an example?

edit: let me expand that a bit:

In a modifying clause you can use の where you would use が in a main clause, eg:
葉室さんの持った写真のハート型のデザインは初めてデザイン。

(I have a feeling that using が here is somehow more 'marked' than の.)

I'm not sure what you have in mind by 'introducing a topic' -- は is used to mark an already-known thing (ie not something freshly introduced that the listener doesn't know about) as the topic for a sentence/conversation. I don't think you can do that in a modifying clause at all.

I was going to claim that if you introduced (ie first mentioned) something in a modifying clause you couldn't then make it the topic using は in a later sentence but on reflection that's clearly false and I don't know why I thought it :-)

(I suspect that we would agree on actual meaning of examples and are just hung up on terminology or attempting to explain grammar.)

I meant that が remains が in a modifying clause, but は changes to の.

私が本を買いました。 I'm the one who bought the book.
私が買ったほん the book that I bought

私は本を買いました。I bought a book.
私の買ったほん a/the book I bought

That's an interesting way of looking at it, but I'd really avoid calling it a 'topic' because it isn't. It's an alternative to が that de-emphasizes what it's marking, which is useful because usually が draws attention to whatever it marks, which is not necessarily what you want in a subordinate clause which should by all rights be, well, subordinate. But I think saying that is marks the topic of a subordinate clause just because は similarly de-emphasizes what comes before it is really stretching it. Topics are pretty special and largely removed from the grammatical elements of the sentence at large.

Of course... it makes no practical difference. As pm215 mentioned. But I think that such statements could be misleading to others.

I kind of liked the description of wa and ga in that book "making sense of Japanese", where it firmly stated that ga was a subject marker and compared wa to the English "as for", as in "as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

As for (ha ha) me, I've just been doing a lot of reading and listening and I think that's really the best way to catch on to the subtleties.

QuackingShoe Wrote:I'd really avoid calling it a 'topic' because it isn't.

Take the word "topic" with a grain of salt. It's just commonly used for want of a better word. Understand what は indicates. Then use the word "topic" to mean that.

QuackingShoe Wrote:It's an alternative to が that de-emphasizes what it's marking.

I don't really think of it as an alternative to が. It just seems that way. When は or も are applied to a grammatical subject, they replace が. Likewise they replace を. They are used after most other particles like に・で・から since their meaning can't so easily be understood from context.

As for what は means, I noted down what Tae Kim once wrote:

Quote:Hey, I'm going to talk about this now. So don't assume I'm still talking about the old thing.

That seems to cover most usages of は.

QuackingShoe Wrote:which is useful because usually が draws attention to whatever it marks, which is not necessarily what you want in a subordinate clause which should by all rights be, well, subordinate.

That doesn't makes much sense to me. Look at my examples above. A modifying clause can have a subject if in the context of that clause it supplies new information. Likewise in a modifying clause a repeated or de-emphasized "topic" is marked by の.

QuackingShoe Wrote:Topics are pretty special and largely removed from the grammatical elements of the sentence at large.

I agree in part, which is probably explains the use of の.

Anyway, I don't claim I fully understand Japanese particles. All I'm doing is trying to impart my understanding in the hope that it might be at least partly right. The Japanese themselves don't fully understand them. Keep working at it. All we can arrive it is a working model of how the language works. That's what grammar is. As we find exceptions, we need to revise that model.

Raichu Wrote:Understand what は indicates. Then use the word "topic" to mean that.

OK, let's try an example (made up by me, not real-live-Japanese, but hopefully the inevitable mistakes won't distract from the point):

[A and B are at B's house.]
A: 昨日ジョンさんが依遅くあなたの家へ入っているところを見たんだけど、彼はどうしてここに来たの？
B: 私の使っていた辞書を借りるために来たんだ。
A: いつ帰ったの？

In A's second line, the topic (ie who exactly went home) is 彼, because that was the topic explicitly stated in the first line (and implicitly used in B's line). The 私の in B's line does not change the topic -- this is a job which は does and which の-in-subordinate-clause does not do.

This is what I think QuackingShoe and I mean by 'topic' -- the general "whatever it was the conversation was about" which gets 'set' when you use は and can then be used implicitly later. It's because の-in-subordinate-clause doesn't have the same topic-setting effect that we don't want to call the thing it marks a topic. It's just a subject.

Yes, the topic of the second and third lines is still implicitly 彼. 私 in the subordinate clause is only the topic of the subordinate clause. (Although 私の could also mean "my", but let's say that's not the intent here.)

I never thought of it before, but maybe that's why you have the rule that the topic of a modifying clause is indicated by の. You don't want to detract from the topic of the main clause and inadvertently change it for subsequent utterances.

I'd say it's perfectly fine to call は topic marker, that's what it acts like in 90% of all sentences using it.

Sorry for the late response.

Thanks to everyone for your excellent explanations!!