I recently started reading キノの旅 and ran across the following sentence:
しゃれた造りの木のテーブルとイス。

Is this a proper sentence? I could understand if this was dialog, but it's a descriptive sentence. From DBJG, all I can find is "An important fact about Japanese word order is that each sentence ends in a verb, an adjective, or a form of the copula...". This sentence seem to end in none of those, and is just a noun phrase.

I was hoping some of the extreme-grammar people could help me out here. Thanks in advance!

I don't think you need to think so deeply about this. The vast majority of sentences end as DBJG says, but some break the rule. We do it in English a bit too, and it's pretty similar. It's an incomplete sentence, but can still be used in fairly serious writing from time to time. The reason you don't need to think about it is that you'll eventually get a feel for how rarely this kind of thing is done just by reading a bunch of Japanese.

I think this sort of incomplete sentence is rare in comparison to all other sentences you'll be exposed to, but if you listen to audio books, you will hear them somewhat often. I think most of them have the same kind of descriptive element as "しゃれた造りの木のテーブルとイス。” - I sometimes hear a string of incomplete sentences that are used to describe something in narratives. They're all incomplete sentences, but they all come together in a way that's complete, in a way.

I have a vague memory of Tae Kim writing that the verb required to make a complete sentence could include an implied state of being, so maybe they are proper sentences.

Of course, English uses this type of sentence as well in literature. For instance, the beginning of Dreiser's An American Tragedy: "Dusk--of a summer night. And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants--such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable." Or the opening of Dickens' Bleak House: "London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather."

If used in speech, these sentences have an implied だ, but in this type of descriptive writing it's usually an implied いる or ある, although it might be possible to view it as an implied だ also.

Another place to look for sentence fragments is in the back of a volume of manga, if they have brief blurbs for other series. For instance here's one at random from my shelf:

Quote:仕事を詰め、誕生日のことを考えないよう努めるナナ。一方、レンと一緒にナナに会いに行けると、期待に胸を膨らませていた奈々のもとに思いもよらぬ報せがー!？

Opening with "[descriptive modifying phrase] character-name。" seems to be a standard part of the style for this kind of blurb; my guess is that it makes it sound a bit punchier.

I have the some type of issue with sentences from time to time. I agree with the others.

Tzadeck Wrote:I don't think you need to think so deeply about this.

But it's so fun sometimes.

I guess I'll think of these types of fragments similar to the fragments we use sometimes in literature in English. Funny how strange you think fragments are until somebody points out examples in your own language.