Can you imagine a language where the subject phrase is treated as an adverb phrase?


Japanese people are worrying that they are suffering from the lazy specification of their language; the subject of a Japanese sentence can be eliminated. They think that this would limit the ability of their language, especially in logical expressions. This may also introduce some difficulties to foreigners who want to learn Japanese.

All of these discussions, however, assume that a sentence should contain a subject phrase. The model (grammar) presented here for Japanese language assumes that the relationship between the subject phrase and the verb is a kind of modification. In other words, the subject in a Japanese sentence is an adverb phrase.

In the Japanese language, no grammatical reason can be seen to distinguish the subject from other adverb phrases to express time, place, reason, and so on. Remember the important elements in a newspaper article. They are 5W1H or "Who" "What" "Where" "When" "Why" and "How". The subject(who) is treated here with the same importance as other elements. The principle to construct a Japanese sentence is same.

Will you explicitly describe the time and the place in every sentence? Probably, no. That is not practical. As for the subject, we can do the same.

to Korean
speakers

The author expects that this discussion built with the island language could be also applied to the peninsular language. Your comments are especially welcome.


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