Don't be down Virtua_Leaf, it's OK!

I'm making some assumptions below and if I'm wrong, I apologise.

I think your biggest problem is that you're always trying to understand Japanese rather than produce it. I don't recommend analysing issues like this in such depth unless sentences like the above are ones that you've already been frequently producing yourself.

I would be willing to take a bet that your reading skills are actually pretty good and it's your productive skills (writing and speaking) that need the work. The quotation that you copied is only interesting if you've been using と言った regularly and hadn't thought fully about the consequences of usage. It's a bit like a learner of English studying the intricacies of definite and indefinite articles before producing lots of sentences containing 'the' and 'a'.

So my advice is to speak as much Japanese as you can and work your way through text books that coach you in how to produce Japanese. I'm very sorry if I'm being rude and you're already doing this.

As for your question, sorry about the delay. If 今日 was modifying 授業 then you would say 今日の授業. This makes it explicit that it's today's class, 今日の授業 becomes one element that is part of the larger element 今日の授業がない. The element 今日の授業がない then modifies と.

As it is, it doesn't say 今日の授業. Therefore, in my opinion, whether 今日 modifies "said" or whether it modifies "class" is ambiguous. If quotation marks were inserted, it wouldn't be. eg. ジョンは今日「授業がない」と言った. If the dictionaries authors disagree with me then I'm probably wrong but does it really matter? The meaning doesn't change. Just move on and don't go so deep.

I recommend taking the example sentences of grammar that you don't know (Dictionary of Japanese grammar is wonderful for this) and throwing them into an SRS after you study them and then just reviewing.

You'll get it

Firstly, analysing sentences in this way is really something to be reserved for the cases where you don't understand at first glance what it's saying: you take some complicated monster of a sentence you found in a novel or an article and pin all the bits down on a board so you can work out what the writer was actually saying. For this to work properly you have to already know the grammar underlying it (ie if the sentence was shorter or in several bits you'd not have had trouble with it). So it's supposed to be an aid for cases where your natural understanding has failed and you're trying to bridge the gap with an intellectual, logical analysis.

You might be interested in also reading the bit in Jay Rubin's book 'Making Sense of Japanese' about sentence analysis. (It's the last chapter.) He says that he used to have students analyse sentences in the way suggested by the DBJG, but now prefers a method which starts at the front of the sentence and works forwards, anticipating what comes next. (Kind of assembling the sentence from its individual pieces, rather than starting with the whole thing and dissecting it.) He has a big example with commentary. I'll try to see if I can do something similar with the much shorter sentence ジョンは今日授業がないと言った。

ジョンは

OK, we have the topic for this sentence, ie "John". This is modifying a verb, or maybe an adjective or the copula, which will be the main predicate of the sentence.

今日

"today". This is a noun; in fact it's what EDICT codes as 'n-t', a noun-temporal, which means that what we're looking at here might be a noun (in which case it will need a particle after it), or it could be modifying a verb/adjective to come (in which case it won't).

授業が

"lesson". Since 今日授業 isn't a compound noun, 今日 must have been the temporal thingy. So at this point we still have 今日 waiting for its verb (something happened today, but what?), and now we also have 授業, which the が tells us is the subject of some verb (maybe the same verb, maybe not).

ない

Ah, a verb, we can get rid of some of these modifiers by attaching them to it. At least 授業が (giving us "there is no lesson"), and perhaps also 今日 (as wrightak notes, the sentence is ambiguous). So a chunk of the sentence so far collapses down into a single verb phrase:
授業がない (or perhaps 今日授業がない) -- and from now on we can think of that as a single unit.

と

Quote. The preceding verb phrase (not just the verb!) attaches to this. So we expect some sort of 'saying' kind of a verb, and indeed:

言った。

"said", and the end of the sentence. Anything we haven't already managed to deal with must be modifying this -- so ジョンは (remember that?) is modifying this verb. And this is the other place we could attach 今日 to.

Well, that was seriously overkill for such a short sentence, but hopefully you get the general idea -- gather up bits of the sentence until you find things they could be modifying, and when you have modifier+modified, you can treat that as a complete unit (what DBJG is calling an ESU). Really, you should go out and buy a copy of Rubin's book, though :-)

I liked reading that part of DBJG. However I wouldn't worry about what is the modifer or what is modified or whatever names they give to it.

I don't think it was mentioned yet, but from my understanding, temporal "words" can often have the particle は removed. So in this case if you put the particle back in :

ジョンは今日は授業がないと言った。

Jon, today, said "there is no class".

EDIT: what Ryuujin just said

PPS: regarding the sentence units and sentence order, also see Japanese for nerds.

Jarvik7 wrote:

the ジョンは part could also conceivably be part of the quote

My gut feeling on that one is that it's a very unnatural reading, because I don't like having all those は-clauses inside what is in some ways a subordinate clause (Japanese not making much distinction between direct and indirect speech). Does anybody have a real example of a は-clause clearly binding to the quote and not to the outer scope? (My guess is that if you do it will have quote marks in it.)

Both interpretations are clearly written on the image:

(Today John said that there wasn't any class

John said that there isn't class today

.

pm215 wrote:

My gut feeling on that one is that it's a very unnatural reading, because I don't like (...)

Languages are the way they are whether you like it or not (specially if you aren't a native speaker). I think you are not really trying to understand the sentence. Rather, you are trying to create your own image about what the sentence "should" mean.

Jarvik7 wrote:

It is actually ambiguous in more ways if you consider the fact that the ジョンは part could also conceivably be part of the quote (<unnamed subject> said that John has no class today).

pm215 wrote:

Does anybody have a real example of a は-clause clearly binding to the quote and not to the outer scope? (My guess is that if you do it will have quote marks in it.)

I think that the following sentence may be taken as an example:

ジョンはスサンは目がきれいだと言った。

John ha Susan ha eye(s) ga nice da to told

John told that [Susan has nice eyes / Susan's eyes are nice]

Transtic wrote:

pm215 wrote:

My gut feeling on that one is that it's a very unnatural reading, because I don't like (...)

Languages are the way they are whether you like it or not (specially if you aren't a native speaker).

Well, obviously. Perhaps I was a bit unclear; I'll try to rephrase and expand. I think that part of trying to acquire a second language is building up an internal subconscious model of what is and isn't 'correct', so that as you speak you say the things which "feel right" and they are correct. You can't stop to think logically about it all. I certainly don't claim that my gut feeling outranks that of a native speaker, but on the other hand I do listen to it because it's quite often right. What I was trying to say was "I feel like this is wrong (and when I look more analytically at it this is why it feels wrong) but I'm not totally sure, so can anybody say one way or the other?" (You have to try to update your gut feelings when they're wrong, too, since the whole point is to try to improve that internal model...)

Transtic wrote:

pm215 wrote:

Does anybody have a real example of a は-clause clearly binding to the quote and not to the outer scope? (My guess is that if you do it will have quote marks in it.)

I think that the following sentence may be taken as an example:

ジョンはスサンは目がきれいだと言った。

By "real" there I meant "genuine Japanese produced by a native speaker (and not as a created example sentence)". (Er, I guess "real" was a bit cryptic too; sorry.)  Example sentences are tricky things because by nature they're lacking context and can be a bit artificial. And a reading which might be obvious in the right context can look odd if you take the sentence standing alone.

Transtic wrote:

ジョンはスサンは目がきれいだと言った。

John ha Susan ha eye(s) ga nice da to told

Am I the only one thinking this should be　「ジョンはスサンの目がきれいだと言った。」?

EDIT: Looking at my Kenkyusha it seems not...

彼は目が充血している.
and
彼女は目が窪んでいた.

Last edited by splice42 (2008 April 10, 10:40 am)

Wow, just... wow this is the site that keeps on giving! Thank you all for your help and advice. I've taken on board what's been said and am currently trying to put them in motion. I already feel a lot more confident just for going over the core particles again.