Your third example isn't valid. It needs a bit of tweak.
Tarou ga Noriko wo mita toshokan
The particle "ga" and "wa" both introduce a topic. But in a phrase to explain a noun, we use "ga" exclusively. Your main point still holds, in a sense that "Tarou ga Noriko wo mita" is a valid sentence. But to be precise, "mita" in those two sentences are different conjugated forms; it just happens that two conjugated forms are the same in the verb "miru" (to see).
> The particle "ga" and "wa" both introduce a topic
Forgive me for saying this, since you seem to be a native speaker, but don't you mean that they both introduce the subject, not topic (using 'topic' as a linguistic term)?
"Wa" would be the topicalising subject marker, denoting known information:
Tanaka wa nihon ni itta.
Tanaka went to Japan. -> As for Tanaka, he went to Japan.
Tanaka = known information (i.e. Tanaka is familiar to the listener)
"Ga", while also a subject marker could denote/introduce new information:
Tanaka ga nihon ni itta.
Tanaka went to Japan. -> e.g. It was Tanaka who went to Japan.
Tanaka = new information (e.g. the listener is did not not Tanaka was the one going to Japan.)
(Note: I realise there are other constructions for my interpretation of the ga-sentence)
My knowledge of Japanese grammar is in Japanese, so I'm not certain about the English term of 主語, to be honest. We use the same term to describe 'subject' in English grammar. I used 'topic' just because the original article used it.
Your explanation of 'ga'/'wa' is spot on as far as I can understand as a layman of native speaker with standard Japanese grammar education in Japan but no advanced linguistic degree.
I'd say that, because 'wa' emphasizes the introduced subject as the center of interest, it isn't used in the subordinate clause.
Tanaka ga nihon ni itta hi. (The day Tanaka went to Japan) ; ok - the interest is on 'hi'
Thanks for your reply. I believe 主語 covers both subject and topic. Since an English sentence such as "John loves Mary." can be understood as e.g. "It is John (not James) who loves Mary." or "John loves Mary (not Lisa)", it might have several formal representations in Japanese via e.g. the use of wa/ga.
Also, see user gizmo686's excellent explanation for one approach below.
Not a native speaker, but have studied Japanese linguisticly (as well as as a second language).
Wa is a bit of a complicated topic. The prevailing thinking is (roughly) that it has two distinctive meanings: topic marking, and contrastive. As a topic marker, wa does not introduce the subject (although in many cases, there is a null anaphora referring to the topic).
In anycase, the common linguistic explanation for shiro's correction is that the subject of subordinate clauses resists topicalization.
(Is this where people start flaunting their phd:s, professor titles? j/k ;-) academic here as well - I do not hold a phd)
Well, I realise the topic + contrast bit but is it really treated as a null anaphora, rather than acting as both topic and subject marker in my example...? My examples referred to information structure more than anything.
Yes, I realise you can have sentences like "Ashita wa Tanaka ga..."/"Sou wa hana ga nagai." - I've even seen a discussion on double topics (some old, theoretical text by Yasuo Kitahara IIRC, probably more known for 'Mondai-na Nihongo'). I also realise that in some contexts where it seems to denote a subject its noun is only a topic ("watashi wa unagi desu").
Logically, it would indeed be quite difficult for a subordinate clause to contain the/a topic.
Anyway, I'm curious if you happen to have further explanations (or articles)!
(Unrelated note: why is it that Japanese of all things make us crawl out from under our rocks...? :-))
No PHD here either, just undergrad followed by some hobbiest reading (of scholarly sources) on Japanese linguistics.
To be clear, the comment about null anaphora was more of a throwaway comment anticipating the objection that sometimes the topicalizing wa does mark the subject. While I have seen this explanation presented, and it is my prefered explanation, I would not necessarily call it pervasive. Now, for the explanation itself (unfourtantly, I am on vacation, so cannot check any of my references).
Japanese is a clear example of a pro-drop language, so using pronoun dropping (aka, null anaphora) as an explanation requires less justification than it would in English, where we only see it in specific contexts. Additionally, we see the topicalizing "wa" in various contexts, not all of which can be understood as subjects, so a unified explanation that can account for all of them would be preferred.
For example, consider the sentence
1) Mary-ga ringo-o tabeta
We can topicalize Mary with the following derivation:
We also have the following sentence (kudamono = fruit)
Kudamono-wa Mary-ga ringo-o tabeta
Admittedly, I struggle to think of a context where the speaker would not drop Mary due to context, but that should not be relevent here, and I am sure that there exists better examples.
Notice that, under the null anaphora explanation, all three of these examples could be explained in the same way. If we were to explain the first example as wa being a subject marker, then we would need to explain the second example as wa being an object marker, and the third example as wa being just a topic marker.
I have seen an alternative explanation that describes topicalization in Japanese as a transformation rule. I have mostly seen this by researchers who view Japanese non-configurationally, who argue that a rule such as [ga/o] -> [wa] in a non configurational language is directly analogous to a movement rule in a configurational analysis. Even under this approach, you still need to account for sentences where the topic has no co-referential place in the rest of the sentence.
Further, even under this alternative explanation, I would still not call wa a topic marker. Rather, I would say that when the listener reconstructs the deep-structure, he uses pragmatics to infer what syntactic role the topic plays. Indeed, If you consider a sentences such as ringo wa tabeta and Mary wa tabeta you can see that there is no syntactic way to identify where the topic falls in the deep structure.
1. You can't topicalise the subject of a subordinate clause. 2. Only plain form is valid for verbs in a subordinate clause. (maybe the particle "kara" could be seen as an exception here)
Which makes the timing all the more inscrutable. AV1 is supposed to have its bitstream finalized this month. Why now, when WebM is so widespread and there are new formats on the horizon, resurrect APNG after neglecting it at the only time it was relevant?
APNG is the format Apple is using for sticker packs in iMessage. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess Google is ramping up to announce a sticker store for Allo... sticker pack devs could port them over without any effort.
Small pictures to put in chat clients, rather like large emoji. It seems pointless, but I've had friends complain about going from clients that support stickers back to text chats like irc.
You can already do all this. In practice, I've never seen a site render its text and ads to a canvas to make things difficult for me.
IMO, the bigger obstacle to "content that can't be linked, saved/archived, mirrored, cached, shared, translated or made otherwise accessible" is the "fundamental architecture of the web": HTTP. You can't link it (who knows if the person who clicks the link will get the same page?), you can't cache it (who knows when to invalidate it?), you can't mirror it (who can enumerate the dependencies?), and so on. Something like IPFS would fix these things (and should fix these things). But in practice, a fairly cacheable, linkable, mirrorable, sharable web has been built on HTTP and I expect nothing much will change when wasm is thrown into the big vat of web technologies too.
Every number system in which all numbers occupy the same amount of space must have this property (namely, that there are roughly as many positive numbers above 1 as below 1, and therefore that there is greater precision near 0) or the accuracy of the function x->1/x will suffer.
Jackmott is the one who introduced the standard of "controlled experiments". Why doesn't he propose an experiment design which will shed light on the question of whether classes are harmful or not?
For one, traits are inherently static and their methods are statically dispatched, somewhat like a concept. Traits which satisfy certain conditions which make them "base class-like" can be reified as a trait object, which is a vtable ptr + data ptr pair, which dynamically dispatches through the vtable. The separation of the vtable ptr from the object means every trait object gives you dynamic dispatch for one trait only and you can have an unbounded number of trait objects, in contrast to C++ where you have dynamic dispatch through the finite number of base classes listed by the class author.
Just "bought" implies that the sale of the books is compassed in the past. It sounds strange because no explicit compass is mentioned and the reader suspects they are still for sale. I don't see anything wrong with "at least" though. Note that "over" changes the meaning (>= vs. >) and at least some prescriptivists obelize using "over" like that (I believe the AP Stylebook used to).
I have seen students get very confused by the ^-1 arcsin thing. Imho that one needs to go away and just use the word arcsin or develop a proper symbol for "inverse"
Tarou wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko at the library.)
Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko.)
Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita toshokan (The library where Tarou saw Noriko)
Generally "<sentence> <noun>" means "the <noun> such that <noun> <particle> <sentence> is true for some choice of <particle>".