文 construction
Every fully-formed 文 (sentence) contains at least one 文節 (clause). Many only have one, but complex sentences might have many.
文節 (clauses) are the most important grammatical structure when diagramming.
Every 文節 contains two parts: a 主語 (subject) and a 述語 (predicate).
Every clause always has a logical 主語 (subject) and 述語 (predicate)!
The 主語 might be implied and depend on context, but at least part of the 述語 will always be explicitly provided.
These two parts form the framework of every clause.
主語 (subjects)
The 主語 answers who or what. The character 主 (“master”) provides a clue: The 主語 is the “master” of the clause: it’s performs an action, or simply exists in some state of being.
The 主語 is usually identified by the 助詞 (particle) 「が」that immediately follows.
One point of confusion for foreign learners: The 主語 is often omitted in speech or writing. It’s often implied from prior context, or something outside of the sentence itself.
Imagine, for example, that someone pointed at a flower and uttered the single word sentence:
咲いている
That is a complete, grammatical, single-clause Japanese sentence that means “blooming”.
The intended subject of that sentence is obviously flower. They are pointing out that the flower is blooming.
But that’s the semantic (logical) 主語 — there is no syntactical (literal) 主語 anywhere in the sentence. It’s a complete, and perfectly grammatical, Japanese sentence nonetheless.
主語 are often omitted in writing or speech, but something always acts as the logical “master” in every clause, even if isn’t explicitly mentioned.
Since sentence diagrams are all about syntax, this last rule presents a bit of quandary.
If every clause has a subject, and we wish to diagram complete clauses, what do we display when a clause uses an implied logical 主語, and no literal subject actually appears? How do we show that the logical subject comes from somewhere outside of the sentence itself?
Subjectless clauses
If asked to translate the sentence「咲いている」into English, we’d write ”It’s blooming”.
English grammar requires an explicit subject to form a grammatical clause, so we (somewhat unconsciously) add the word “it”.
Whether we realize it or not, we’ve trained our brains to always include at least a pronoun so that there is a subject in every English clause.
But there is no Japanese word for “it” explicitly present in the original sentence! We’ve completely imagined an explicit subject (“it”) out of thin air and added it to our translation.
English grammar rules mandate an explicit subject (“it”), but Japanese grammar rules simply don’t.
The word “it” doesn’t even add any information to the sentence! It just informs us of something we already knew: something is acting as the subject.
To completely beat the point into the ground: We could effectively and completely communicate the idea that a flower is blooming even in English by pointing to it and just saying the single word “blooming”.
We might even think that in our heads. Unfortunately, actually saying a solitary word like that sounds like a crazy person talking to themselves. We automatically say, ”it’s blooming” when talking to someone else.
A Japanese person would simply say「咲いている」. They don’t need to prefix it with something like「あれが」because Japanese grammar automatically implies a pronoun when the subject is omitted.
Japanese grammar automatically implies a pronoun if the subject is omitted.
Using proper grammar in either language makes us seem less crazy to others when communicating!
The zero pronoun
But what pronoun do we use when the subject isn’t given explicitly? Should we use “I”, “he”, “she”, “it”, or what?
Ideally, we’d like to use the same exact diagram for the sentence「咲いている」no matter the context we find it in. We’d like to use the same diagram whether someone is pointing to a flower (“it’s blooming”) or if it’s a weird science fiction novel with someone pointing to their neighbor (“he’s blooming”).
Many foreign learners (the author in particular) find it easier to imagine a magical “zero pronoun” acting as the syntactic 主語 when it is omitted. It’s a “zero” pronoun because it’s not spoken out loud, nor does it ever appear in “real” writing (though we will show it in diagrams!).
The zero pronoun acts like any other pronoun (e.g. he, she, they, it, etc.): it stands in for something else. It’s a magic pronoun, though, because it can act like any other pronoun, standing in for literally anything.
If the context is a flower, it means “it”. If the context is the author, it means “I”. If the context is the author’s neighbor, it means “he”.
The zero pronoun is an important but admittedly nebulous semantic concept. In order to make it obvious that Japanese clauses always have a subject, we will make the zero pronoun visible and explicit in our diagrams.
Japanese sentence diagrams use the symbol ◯ to represent the zero pronoun. [To make it easier to type, the symbol “@” is also acceptable.]
When we hear or read a sentence like 「咲いている」, it’s quite helpful for English speakers to imagine that the sentence read:
[ ◯ が ] 咲いている
The stuff in brackets is only imaginary. It isn’t normally pronounced when the sentence is read aloud, because it isn’t actually in the original sentence. It only ever appears in sentence diagrams and in examples like this one.
Occasionally, though, we’ll want to talk about an example like this, or about a sentence diagram rather than the sentence itself. In that case, the author has taken to saying「まる」(as in an empty circle: ◯) instead of “zero pronoun”.
If forced to read the above example out loud, for example, he’d say 「まるが さいている」(perhaps putting “air quotes” around the 「まるが」).
Japanese clauses do not require an explicit 主語. The subject can be implied. When it’s left out, imagine the “zero pronoun” in its place.
述語 (predicates)
The 述語 specifies what is done, or how, in what way, it’s done. It comes at the end of the clause.
述語 are always at the very end of a clause.
Examples:
- 鳥が鳴く (“the bird chirps”)
- 部屋が寒い (“the room is-cold”)
- 鳥が静かだ (“the bird is-quiet”)
The 述語 in these sentences are 鳴く, 寒い, and 静かだ, respectively. They are all different types of 用言.
“Missing” 述語
Japanese allows us to omit the subject of a sentence (using the zero pronoun).
Some sentences sometimes seem to omit the predicate, but this is never the case.
Every sentence has both a subject and a predicate. In particular, every Japanese sentence must have a predicate!
Sometimes, though, a sentence only provides a single 名詞 or a single “adjective” (形容詞 or 形容動詞). Obviously, something must be implied in this case.
The rule is simple: if necessary, append the 助動詞 だ to whatever was provided. That is, assume だ was implied but not explicitly stated.
Linguists call the auxiliary verb だ a copula. It couples two things. It says those two things are equal or belong together somehow.
Say, for example, someone pointed at a cow and asked “What kind of animal is that?”. The one-word reply is, of course:「牛」(うし, a cow).
That is a grammatically complete and correct sentence, believe it or not. It means 「[◯ が] 牛 [だ]」([“it” is] a cow).
The noun 牛 is converted to a 用言 by the 助動詞 「だ」.
This works with 形容動詞, too. Normally, a speaker would include the だ (as discussed previously).
If someone suddenly said, 「静か」 , the logically correct translation would be ”it is-quiet” if the context implied they were talking about the room, and ”she is-quiet” if they were talking about their wife. Either way, the correct translation would be 「[◯ が] 静か [だ]」(@ is quiet).
If the only word provided is 形容詞, then the だ becomes unnecessary. If someone thought the room was cold, they might say 「寒い！」 which should be parsed as 「[◯ が] 寒い！」(meaning “it is-cold”). Again, adding だ to a sentence ending with 形容詞 is always wrong, so だ is not implied in this case.
Other 文節 components
In addition to the 主語 and 述語, there are three other functional components that can appear in 文節:
修飾語
修飾語 are modifiers or qualifiers affecting something else.
For example, in the (subjectless) clause:
ゆっくり 歩く (“Walk slowly”)
the word ゆっくり (slowly) is 修飾語 modifying 歩く (to walk, the 述語).
接続語
接続語 are conjunctives that connect clauses.
For example:
安いのに、おいしい (“Even though it’s cheap, it’s delicious”)
Here, のに (“even though”) is 接続語 (a connective or conjunctive) between two different (single word) clauses.
Note that in this example both clauses omitted the subject. It’s actually the same implied subject in both clauses (logically: whatever food they are talking about).
独立語
独立語 are independent, standalone words (interjections and exclamations).
The serve almost no functional/structural purpose. We can mostly ignore them when it comes to diagramming.
Example:
さあ、やろう (“C’mon, Let’s do it”)
The word さあ (“C’mon”, “well”, “Allright”) is 独立語 a standalone word. The real clause (again subject-less) is やろう (“Let’s do it”). 1G